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Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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