this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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Is Electron that bad? Really? I have Slack open right now with two servers and it takes around 350MB of RAM. Not that bad, considering that every other colleague thinks that posting dumb shit GIFs into work chats is cool. That's definitely nowhere close to Firefox, Chrome and WebStorm eating multiple gigs each.
Yes, it really is that bad. 350 MBs of RAM for something that could otherwise have taken less than 100? That isn't bad to you? And also, it's not just RAM. It's every resource, including CPU, which is especially bad with Electron.
I don't really mind Electron myself because I have enough resources. But pretending the lack of optimization isn't a real problem is just not right.
First of all, 350MB is a drop in a bucket. But what's more important is performance, because it affects things like power consumption, carbon emissions, etc. I'd rather see Slack "eating" one gig of RAM and running smoothly on a single E core below boost clocks with pretty much zero CPU use. That's the whole point of having fast memory - so you can cache and pre-render as much as possible and leave it rest statically in memory.
CPU usage is famously terrible with Electron, which i also pointed out in the comment you're replying to. But yes, having multiple chromium instances running for each "app" is terrible
No, it's not.
... Okay?
Do you really want me to go into the details of how JIT works in V8 and which Electron APIs allow the apps to idle correctly?
Yes it is.
"iT'S oNLy a FeW hUnDrED MB oF LiBRAriES and BiNAriES pEr aPp, iT'S oNLy dOuBLe oR tRiPLe tHe RAM, DiSk, anD cpU uSAgE"
Then we have the fucking shit show of 6-8GB of RAM used just by booting the fucking machine. Chromium/Webkit is practically an OS by itself for all the I/O, media handling, and built in libraries upon libraries of shit. Let's run that whole entire stack for all these electron apps, and then fragment each one independent of each other (hello Discord, who used Electron 12 for WAY too long) then say "bUt iT's pORtaBLe!".
Yes, it isn't just terrible, it's fucking obnoxiously and horrendously terrible, like we grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory terrible, and moronically insipid. Optimization in the fucking trash can and a fire hydrant in all our fucking assholes, terrible. That's HOW terrible it actually is, so you're wrong.
RAM usage doesn't matter in the slightest.