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Comment by jnordwick | Hacker News Reader

I'm way more worried about memory issues while running. Atom take up 1 gig+ with very little open. It pushes all my other tools out of RAM and into swap. Switching to the browser to see documentation takes a few seconds if I'm lucky.

Compiling a few more seconds to page in. Ssh a few more. Everything on my laptop slows to a crawl as they fight for RAM with Atom taking up the way more than it should.

I know the answer, "buy more RAM it's cheap", from the Atom people, but then my browser people tell me the same thing. So do my interface people, and my kernel people, and by the time I say "okay" to all of them, I'm out of RAM again.

Application need to learn they aren't the only thing running. For some reason, my machine seems to be getting slower and slower no matter how much I upgrade.

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> I'm way more worried about memory issues while running.

Same here. Start-up time is important when the average user is hitting a web app or application but for developers? We open something once and then keep it open pretty much all day.

Unless I'm an edge case I'd suspect start-up time is mostly meaningless to developers with long running developer tools.

At the same time we always have tons of tools open at once so we need as much memory as possible because once things hit the swap the performance degrades terribly.

If Atom ran like vim, I'd take 60 seconds+ of startup time. If it ran like ed, maybe even an hour.

I probably spend more time hitting backspace when typing 'atom' than they saved in startup time.

What is cheaper, more memory or a SublimeText license?

Depends on the region you're in. Around here an 8gb ram module costs the same as a sublime text license.

I'll take the license.

I was just looking at a DDR3L 8GB module for $43, but I could perhaps see the value in Sublime at $70 a license if it significantly improves on Atom, but as it is I've yet to even fully utilize all that Atom offers, or have pain points.

> For some reason, my machine seems to be getting slower and slower no matter how much I upgrade.

I've been feeling this way for years, and I've mostly ascribed it to my faulty perception. I figured that if things simply aren't getting faster (i.e., they're not changing at all), I'm probably just imagining them getting slower.

But then I start wondering why aren't things getting faster...

amdahl's law

Atom is far from the only option. There are plenty of better text editors that will fly on that machine.

I don't get this. I've built text editors in JavaScript. I've built Electron apps. Granted, I've never built a text editor in Electron. But it's gotta be some trivial combination of my past experiences. I don't understand why Atom is such a pig.

Sounds like you're running on 4GB of RAM, which in today's dev world is nothing, I've been on 16GB for over 3 years and have yet to worry about RAM being a limiting factor.

I'd say buy some more RAM, it IS cheap and you never have too much.

Laptops with 16 gb are still very rare.

I've had 16GB in my laptop for about 3 years now. Laptop CPUs have supported 16GB for quite a while. Granted I'm an Apple guy, so maybe 16GB isn't as accessible in Windows world? :(

same here, I've switched away from Atom for that reason.

You could try lowering the "swappiness".

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