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Comment by holydude | Hacker News Reader

The other problem is that most electron apps are incredibly big. I do not want to download 150mb single purpose apps. The memory hog is not the only it's also the battery drain most electron apps suffer from.

If you compare Finda to something like voidtool's Everything it's night and day.

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> If you compare Finda to something like voidtool's Everything it's night and day.

On my Mac, Finda appears to launch and run instantly.

The voidtool's site doesn't specify which platform it's for, but it appears to be Windows-only. Two of the downloads are called “portable zip”, but they unzip into folders that contain exe files.

This is indeed a night-and-day difference, and helps illustrate the OP's point.

I don’t understand the size argument. Disk space is super cheap today. Facebook’s Android app is 350MB and not a lot of people really care, on Desktop, 150MB is nothing.

Plus it satisfies the “all libs/dependencies in one app”, which is exactly what macOS’s .app, Linux’s Snaps and AppImage, or more generally all Android/iPhone apps are doing.

I agree with the RAM/power things too, but these issues come from web pages in general, not Electron itself.

A clean "hello world" Electron excrement takes 200+ MB in RAM. How is that an "issue from web pages" exactly?

Where did you get this information? I just tested "electron-quick-start" on Linux and all 3 processes use 40 MiB together

Here on my systems (Ubuntu, Gentoo) electron-quick-start leads to ~90 MB more memory usage and it spawns 4 processes which use 110MB, 74MB, 74MB and 44MB of resident memory. So obviously quite some memory is shared between those and probably other processes on my system, but nevertheless the resulting memory consumption is far above 40 MB.

I used gnome-system-monitor to check memory usage, which doesn't include the memory used by the executable image itself, and which I believe is more than 60 MiB.

Theoretically this memory could be shared by all electron applications running in a single machine. In practice every Electron app bundles its own runtime.

I tested on Mac and my numbers were higher. Even if some memory is shared between parent and child processes, each still has its own isolated VM, a DOM tree and a memory heap. So a lot of that is not shared.

A full electron app i am making handles about 10,000+ records in memory along with react. Never seen it go above 150 mb on any system. You must have misread the numbers.

If anyone seeks an alternative to Facebook's app, there's Face Slim from the f-droid repository:

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.indywidualni.fblite/

1.3 MiB

Disk space is cheap, but internet access might be limited by monthly data cap or just be slow (think 3G networks). And with every app update user must re-download the same electron runtime. Also bigger apps takes longer to start and in this particular app case, low startup time should be critical.

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