Hacker News Reader

Comment by adamcstephens | Hacker News Reader

Electron apps use more CPU and drain the battery faster on my Linux laptop. Users may not care what framework renders their apps, but if they were running more than one or two electron instances they may start to notice their battery life is awful. It’s worse on Linux already, there’s no reason to make it even worse.

View on HN

Faster than? Do you compare applications that do similar things?

Other text editors. Other chat apps. Other music players. The same apps before Electron.

Take a look at desktop Telegram when you have some time. It bundles its own fork of Qt (which inflates its shared memory usage as nobody else is using the library), has a very polished UI and all the same features as any other modern messenger, and runs circles around any Electron application I've ever seen. On my machine from 2014 it starts instantly and the memory usage never goes above 200-250 MBs, which is not ideal, but still is ~4 times less than the _startup_ memory usage of an Electron application.

I just started VSCode on my desktop. Its "_startup_ memory", with something like two dozen extensions installed, is sitting at 170MB. I also just started Discord on my desktop. Its "_startup_ memory" is 39MB.

Now Slack's a pig at 380MB, fresh-opened, sure. But reality doesn't really seem to oblige these kinds of claims in 2021.

Are you looking at a single worker process out of about 10? This is such a frequent mistake it's not even funny. Do something resembling a proper measurement: run `free -m` (or the alternative on your OS) before starting VSCode, and then right after it finishes loading, ideally on a completely bare system to reduce noise.

Here are my numbers for a freshly installed 1.53.2 with zero plugins and no configuration:

  used
  2882

  used
  3404

OK, it's "only" 522 MBs for a bare-bones text editor which requires "two dozen plugins" to make somewhat usable.

I wish there was a stickied post feature to head off these sorts of RSS measuring contests.

Multiprocess applications, and especially multiprocess applications with really big discardable caches, are extremely difficult to compare apples-to-apples.

I'm on Windows at the moment and, yes, I'm looking at the whole application's memory usage. Even with half a dozen tabs open, right now, it's sitting at 250MB combined. (Which--well, I've got 64GB, I shall benevolently allow it.)

Discord has jumped up to about 300MB with a bunch of use, though 50MB (?!) of that is the Discord updater, which is pretty wild.

Thanks for the numbers, thats indeed quite a difference.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com