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Comment by tjohns | Hacker News Reader

I like that "Not made from a web browser" is a headlining feature. My laptop has 16 GB of RAM, and still doesn't have enough memory to run all the Electron apps I use without grinding to a halt.

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I think this meme needs to die. I run 3 massive electron apps on the regular, in addition to my multiple IntelliJ IDE instsances and RDBMS clients on a 16gb Macbook Pro, the latter category being the biggest resource hogs.

Just because it doesn't affect you doesn't make it an untrue meme. Electron apps are notorious for bloat, that isn't a meme, it's a fact.

The only apps that consistently send my laptop fans in to a flying rage are Electron based apps.

It's not a meme if it's true. Here's my current system.

https://i.imgur.com/Eqo3pcv.png

800Mb to VS Code

650Mb to Slack

Is slack's web socket taking 600Mb?

It's 3.7% of your total RAM, hardly a "grinding to halt" amount.

Is 800Mb acceptable for a chat app?

When we pay less than $10/gb for ram and our systems have 32 gb and more, I do consider it acceptable. As long as the speed of development and feature implementation is sufficiently improved of course.

My system doesn't have 32GB RAM, and I really don't want that because my users don't have 32GB of RAM, they have 4GB. I don't want to get in the habit of just throwing away RAM because some target devices may have much less available, and I may want to port to such limited devices (phones, Raspberry Pi, small VPS instances, etc) where RAM is hard to come by or expensive.

An app's resource use should just justified by what the app does. It's really telling when a 3D game engine uses about the same resources as an electron app.

Who is our? Most systems do not have 32gb of RAM. My grandma isn't going to be writing emails on a MBP with maxed out specs, neither will a majority of people have more than 4 or 8GB of RAM.

Source: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

No.

Ripcord is currently running in 23.3MB on my machine

Is all 800mb resident, and just for that app? On osx people often just look a the 'Memory' column in activity monitor, which says slack + the slack helpers are using 1.4GB of memory (OMG Electron sucks!) - but it is using 633MB of real memory. So not great if you are used to bitchx or something. But not terrible - half of what it initially looks like. Memory management is complicated.

You're shifting the goalposts. Original text contained mention of 650MB Slack making your 16GB system "grind to a halt".

IntelliJ has much more functionality than Slack so it's a poor choice to compare it to. Also... comparing slow cross platform tool to another sluggish cross platform tool isn't really a great place to start.

The fact that this Rip Cord does 99% of what Slack does and uses a fraction of the memory and runs faster pretty much says it all. Javascript/ Electron are resource hogs.

Badly written Javascript/Electron apps are resource hogs.

Compared to virtually any compiled language, Javascript is a resource hog, regardless of how well written.

It is also single-threaded (without workers, which have their own limitations), and any large calculation can block that main thread.

Sure, it may be efficient but what percentage of feature compatibility do you think they'll be able to reproduce and maintain?

Largely depends on how quickly Slack/ Discord move their APIs and how aggressively those platforms block this kind of app. This has little to do with app performance though. Slack is a sluggish pig because the way it's written, not because of it's feature-set

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