6 ms·

300MB of ram sounds like a lot to me. What are you storing in memory that is that large? If I dont use the app for 1 hour will it stop using the memory?

by yani 8y ago

muszc-master 8y ago
Most of this comes from overhead in Chromium, which currently (the version used by Ivelope) suffers from a few bugs which increases memory usage. I think this will drastically go down as time progresses and new updates of Chromium becomes available
- wcarss 8y ago
  not intended to be a hostile ask here, but do you know any specific bugs to check out? As a past (very minor) contributor to chromium+webkit I'm curious if there's anything one can do to help, but I haven't kept up with their status in a long time.
  - muszc-master 8y ago
    Specifically the image bug, as another commenter linked to: http://seenaburns.com/debugging-electron-memory-usage/ http://seenaburns.com/debugging-electron-memory-usage/
    - opencl 8y ago
      Is this even considered a bug by the Chromium team (i.e. is there any indication of plans to fix it, or is this just the image cache working as intended)? It's a 10 year old project and memory usage has always been fairly high, I don't see any indication of a major focus on reducing it anytime soon. I don't hate Electron apps or anything, but the ones I already have open are using up enough of my memory that there isn't much left to run more of them. I really do hope this improves in the future though. If not I may just have to buy more RAM.
Kliment 8y ago
That's just the base cost of using electron (along with the associated CPU usage). It's terrifying but you get that much usage even if you're not storing anything in memory.
- brandonwamboldt 8y ago
  Well that's just not accurate. With our Electron app, the main process consumes 40mb of RAM, with each window using 30mb of RAM, so if you have a windowed app, thats a minimum of under 70mb of RAM (results will differ, our app is quite large).
  - Etheryte 8y ago
    Yeah, this is realistic. I wish people would stop perpetuating the myth that "That's just how Electron is". It's perfectly possible to write Electron apps that don't automatically hog half a gig of RAM.
    - Kliment 8y ago
      That's news to me, and people who make electron stuff tell me they can't get it down below a few hundred mb of memory usage. Can you point me to some resources about reducing that?
      - Siilwyn 8y ago
        I'm curious too! I found one interesting article about Electron eating memory with images: http://seenaburns.com/debugging-electron-memory-usage/ http://seenaburns.com/debugging-electron-memory-usage/
    - rsynnott 8y ago
      Are there any examples of Electron apps that don't do that, though? I've never seen one that didn't like to eat at least a few hundred MB, and most of them seem at least somewhat leaky, too.
  - 8y ago
Lio 8y ago
I'm sure that a client like Mutt would use much less but considering that many emails have embed HTML and would ideally use a modern web view to render correctly, how much overhead is there from from using Electron/chromium if you're going to load all of that anyway? I couldn't find exact figures for MS Outlook but Office 365 seems to require 1Gb as a minimum. A quick look at the Gmail tab I have open in Chrome seems to be taking roughly 390Mb so this would seem to be an improvement over that. As a genuine question, what sort of size would you expect for an optimised native app with the same functionality?
- chrismorgan 8y ago
  For reference, when settled, Gmail in Firefox uses 200MB or a bit more, while FastMail uses around 10MB. I’m tempted to make a FastMail Electron app just to demonstrate that Electron/HTML/CSS/JS doesn’t need to mean slow and heavy (it just normally does). Later: OK, so on Windows a trivial Electron “just load https://www.fastmail.com/login https://www.fastmail.com/login (and then log in)” app uses ~230MB of RAM. Not what I was hoping for, though it doesn’t surprise me a great deal—Chrome is quite happy to use lots of memory. Interestingly, when I reduce it from 3000×2000 to 1600×1200 (device pixels, it’s a 2× display), it goes down to about 160MB after a bit, and minimised to 180MB or 120MB for the two window sizes. Still very snappy despite this memory usage, though, for FastMail is fast.
  - lallysingh 8y ago
    That's it? My Gmail tabs used to take 2GB (the last time I checked, years ago).
    - chrismorgan 8y ago
      Actually, that was just from just loading Gmail and letting it idle, a couple of weeks back, not actually using it. A year and a half ago, I recall it being more like 125MB, up towards 150MB as it was used. Gmail hasn’t really changed since then, but the Hangouts widget (which is pretty heavy!) might have, and the browser definitely has (I blame it for most of the increase). I haven’t actually used Gmail since around that time. For reference, I’m using the explicit/window-objects/top(…) figure from about:memory. This is not an accurate representation of the full footprint, but is close enough.
sametmax 8y ago
Thunderbird takes 425mo of my ram right now.
- tluyben2 8y ago
  I switched from Thunderbird to Gmail because of that; it was quite bad on my laptop. It often started swapping requiring very long waits or a reboot to get back to work.
progx 8y ago
Ask native thunderbird developers, why Thunderbird take 400 MB of RAM, only after start the programm.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Because Thunderbird is not actually native, it uses Electron's precursor XUL.
discreditable 8y ago
For comparison, my Thunderbird install with over 60k messages stored locally hits about 220MB.
bildung 8y ago
My Claws Mail currently uses 56M, multiple IMAP accounts configured, a few thousand mails, just visited all accounts before measuring. I disabled HTML display, though (most HTML is either spam or newsletter fluff in my experience). Claws is GTK2.
kookoopuffs 8y ago
Why in this day and age are electron apps this big? What happened to memory management? Is this a faulty aspect of JS or electron itself?
- Lord_Zero 8y ago
  Electron is basically Google Chrome. High memory use has nothing to do with JS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)

300MB of ram sounds like a lot to me. What are you storing in memory that is that large? If I dont use the app for 1 hour will it stop using the memory?

by yani 8y ago

300MB of ram sounds like a lot to me. What are you storing in memory that is that large? If I dont use the app for 1 hour will it stop using the memory?

muszc-master 8y ago

Most of this comes from overhead in Chromium, which currently (the version used by Ivelope) suffers from a few bugs which increases memory usage. I think this will drastically go down as time progresses and new updates of Chromium becomes available

wcarss 8y ago
not intended to be a hostile ask here, but do you know any specific bugs to check out? As a past (very minor) contributor to chromium+webkit I'm curious if there's anything one can do to help, but I haven't kept up with their status in a long time.
- muszc-master 8y ago
  Specifically the image bug, as another commenter linked to: http://seenaburns.com/debugging-electron-memory-usage/ http://seenaburns.com/debugging-electron-memory-usage/
  - opencl 8y ago
    Is this even considered a bug by the Chromium team (i.e. is there any indication of plans to fix it, or is this just the image cache working as intended)? It's a 10 year old project and memory usage has always been fairly high, I don't see any indication of a major focus on reducing it anytime soon. I don't hate Electron apps or anything, but the ones I already have open are using up enough of my memory that there isn't much left to run more of them. I really do hope this improves in the future though. If not I may just have to buy more RAM.

Kliment 8y ago

That's just the base cost of using electron (along with the associated CPU usage). It's terrifying but you get that much usage even if you're not storing anything in memory.

brandonwamboldt 8y ago
Well that's just not accurate. With our Electron app, the main process consumes 40mb of RAM, with each window using 30mb of RAM, so if you have a windowed app, thats a minimum of under 70mb of RAM (results will differ, our app is quite large).
- Etheryte 8y ago
  Yeah, this is realistic. I wish people would stop perpetuating the myth that "That's just how Electron is". It's perfectly possible to write Electron apps that don't automatically hog half a gig of RAM.
  - Kliment 8y ago
    That's news to me, and people who make electron stuff tell me they can't get it down below a few hundred mb of memory usage. Can you point me to some resources about reducing that?
    - Siilwyn 8y ago
      I'm curious too! I found one interesting article about Electron eating memory with images: http://seenaburns.com/debugging-electron-memory-usage/ http://seenaburns.com/debugging-electron-memory-usage/
  - rsynnott 8y ago
    Are there any examples of Electron apps that don't do that, though? I've never seen one that didn't like to eat at least a few hundred MB, and most of them seem at least somewhat leaky, too.
- 8y ago

Lio 8y ago

I'm sure that a client like Mutt would use much less but considering that many emails have embed HTML and would ideally use a modern web view to render correctly, how much overhead is there from from using Electron/chromium if you're going to load all of that anyway? I couldn't find exact figures for MS Outlook but Office 365 seems to require 1Gb as a minimum. A quick look at the Gmail tab I have open in Chrome seems to be taking roughly 390Mb so this would seem to be an improvement over that. As a genuine question, what sort of size would you expect for an optimised native app with the same functionality?

chrismorgan 8y ago
For reference, when settled, Gmail in Firefox uses 200MB or a bit more, while FastMail uses around 10MB. I’m tempted to make a FastMail Electron app just to demonstrate that Electron/HTML/CSS/JS doesn’t need to mean slow and heavy (it just normally does). Later: OK, so on Windows a trivial Electron “just load https://www.fastmail.com/login https://www.fastmail.com/login (and then log in)” app uses ~230MB of RAM. Not what I was hoping for, though it doesn’t surprise me a great deal—Chrome is quite happy to use lots of memory. Interestingly, when I reduce it from 3000×2000 to 1600×1200 (device pixels, it’s a 2× display), it goes down to about 160MB after a bit, and minimised to 180MB or 120MB for the two window sizes. Still very snappy despite this memory usage, though, for FastMail is fast.
- lallysingh 8y ago
  That's it? My Gmail tabs used to take 2GB (the last time I checked, years ago).
  - chrismorgan 8y ago
    Actually, that was just from just loading Gmail and letting it idle, a couple of weeks back, not actually using it. A year and a half ago, I recall it being more like 125MB, up towards 150MB as it was used. Gmail hasn’t really changed since then, but the Hangouts widget (which is pretty heavy!) might have, and the browser definitely has (I blame it for most of the increase). I haven’t actually used Gmail since around that time. For reference, I’m using the explicit/window-objects/top(…) figure from about:memory. This is not an accurate representation of the full footprint, but is close enough.

sametmax 8y ago

Thunderbird takes 425mo of my ram right now.

tluyben2 8y ago
I switched from Thunderbird to Gmail because of that; it was quite bad on my laptop. It often started swapping requiring very long waits or a reboot to get back to work.

progx 8y ago

Ask native thunderbird developers, why Thunderbird take 400 MB of RAM, only after start the programm.

pjmlp 8y ago
Because Thunderbird is not actually native, it uses Electron's precursor XUL.

discreditable 8y ago

For comparison, my Thunderbird install with over 60k messages stored locally hits about 220MB.

bildung 8y ago

My Claws Mail currently uses 56M, multiple IMAP accounts configured, a few thousand mails, just visited all accounts before measuring. I disabled HTML display, though (most HTML is either spam or newsletter fluff in my experience). Claws is GTK2.

kookoopuffs 8y ago

Why in this day and age are electron apps this big? What happened to memory management? Is this a faulty aspect of JS or electron itself?

Lord_Zero 8y ago
Electron is basically Google Chrome. High memory use has nothing to do with JS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)