4 ms·
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 correctl
by Lio 9y 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 9y agoFor 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 9y agoThat's it? My Gmail tabs used to take 2GB (the last time I checked, years ago).
- chrismorgan 9y agoActually, 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.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jsjohnst 9y ago> Gmail in Firefox uses 200MB or a bit more, while FastMail uses around 10MB. Yes, but that’s not a fair apples to apples comparison with his 300mb number. Your looking at the memory used for that tab, not the shared memory used by the browser across tabs. Open Firefox with no sites open and check your baseline memory usage. Add that to the numbers above for a direct comparison.
- chrismorgan 9y agoI sought only to compare Gmail with FastMail, to indicate that Gmail is a poor baseline for memory comparisons.
- jsjohnst 9y agoFair point, I agree there!
- EGreg 9y agoHow exactly will you cut the fat in Electron? What’s a hello world like? 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).
- chrismorgan 9y agoSee my update to the comment. Its memory footprint is greater than I expected. I shan’t pursue it any further at present, I was mostly just curious to get an initial feel for it. Taking it (or something like it) to a polished product is something I’d like to do, but I’ve got other, much more important things to do on FastMail and Topicbox, and I don’t think anyone else in the company feels strongly about it, so it’s unlikely to ever actually happen. One avenue would be to use a different, more light-weight engine; https://github.com/zserge/webview https://github.com/zserge/webview, for example, can use the local platform’s engine, which is likely to be somewhere between a little and a lot more efficient than Electron/Chrome. Running FastMail with the MSHTML renderer via the Rust bindings for that (DPI scaling issues, but meh), it starts at about 60MB but is easy to get over 80MB with some use. Still quite a lot less than Electron/Chrome.
- deagle50 9y agoMaybe you can help me understand the outcry over Electron memory usage, especially on HH. I can't remember the last time I ran out of memory on my laptop or desktop unintentionally. Seems to me battery life and jank should be main areas of focus. You can have a 2GB if you cut CPU usage and typing latency.
- 15charlimit 9y agoJust because you "can" use a bunch of memory without issues now doesn't mean you "should" not make any attempts to cut resource usage whenever possible.
- deagle50 9y ago
- letsgetphysITal 9y agoMy Outlook (2016) client is using ~300MB right now while displaying a full HTML spam mail (taking one for the team, guys). I wouldn't say I'm a heavy user, but there's shared calendars and mailboxes, OneNote integration, task list etc.
- Jaruzel 9y agoConcur, my Outlook (2016/365) is currently using 250Mb. That's with 4 mailboxes open, and a heavy HTML email displayed in the reading pane.
- tallanvor 9y agoOutlook is using less than 220MB for me right now, and that's fairly standard. It seems to be fairly optimized.
- badsectoracula 9y ago> considering that many emails have embed HTML and would ideally use a modern web view to render correctly It might be me, but i prefer them to be rendered incorrectly in a text-only view :-P. I use email since the 90s and so far i do not think i can come up with any case where the HTML in an email was actually useful and not used for fluff (which i do not mind but can do without), branding (which i do not care at all about) or -way way more often- advertisement. Also almost all HTML mails i've seen come in text-only version too and any useful bits are attachments anyway.
- wilsonnb 9y agoOutlook is using 46MB for me at the moment. I don't have a particularly large inbox though.