5 ms·

I have a production Electron application: Video Hub App and if I had a few hundred thousand dollars to waste, I could hire developers to write me Windows, Mac,

by yboris 5y ago

I have a production Electron application: Video Hub App and if I had a few hundred thousand dollars to waste, I could hire developers to write me Windows, Mac, and Linux native applications. But instead I spent a few months by myself and created an application that runs on the three OSes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It's not even a contest: unless you're a corporation making tons of money, you either pick an OS and write a native application ignoring other OSes, or you use Electron (or some alternative). I have 4,000 people who purchased the app and not one complained about RAM or some other nonsense people keep hurling as insults at Electron. https://videohubapp.com/en/ https://videohubapp.com/en/ & https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App (MIT open source)

bjornlouser 5y ago
"... not one complained about RAM ... " Just curious, how much RAM does your app typically use?
- yboris 5y ago
  I think it used to be around 130mb on Windows. I checked just now with the latest Electron 18 - and the ram seems to be around 30mb. The app consumes more RAM when it's extracting screenshots from videos (usually you do this once to build your "hub" - preview of your entire video collection).
  - codedokode 5y ago
    The numbers are suspiciously low. Electron binary itself weighs about 100 Mb, although of course it need not to be fully loaded. Are you using correct way to measure memory usage? I think that the correct way is to measure all physical memory mapped into all Electron processes (there are several of them), making discount for shared pages and adding swapped out pages (because they can potentially be loaded back into main memory). In Linux I usually add PSS and swap usage parsed from /proc, which should give correct numbers (PSS is an additive value). For example, all processes of Skype on my system take approximately 459 Mb in RAM and swap file. If you are only measuring one process memory instead of all and only private memory pages (excluding shared pages and swapped out) then you get the wrong number. I tried to search online what "Memory" column represents in Windows Task Manager and Mac Activity Monitor (which people often use to estimate memory usage), but couldn't find any information. So I cannot be sure that they show true values and that those values can be added to find total memory usage by several processes.
mattgreenrocks 5y ago
Pretty cool app, congrats on launching and building a userbase. Re: Electron comments: don't take those comments on Electron personally, it is just a means to an end. Personally I avoid Electron because the JS ecosystem makes me sad every time I touch it. But that's just me. :)
- yboris 5y ago
  Sure, when my project installs via npm it weighs in over 1GB, but when I bundle it up for distribution, the installer is around 65mb (Windows). TypeScript makes coding a super-pleasure, it's not your grandma's JS ;)

by yboris 5y ago

bjornlouser 5y ago

"... not one complained about RAM ... " Just curious, how much RAM does your app typically use?

yboris 5y ago
I think it used to be around 130mb on Windows. I checked just now with the latest Electron 18 - and the ram seems to be around 30mb. The app consumes more RAM when it's extracting screenshots from videos (usually you do this once to build your "hub" - preview of your entire video collection).
- codedokode 5y ago
  The numbers are suspiciously low. Electron binary itself weighs about 100 Mb, although of course it need not to be fully loaded. Are you using correct way to measure memory usage? I think that the correct way is to measure all physical memory mapped into all Electron processes (there are several of them), making discount for shared pages and adding swapped out pages (because they can potentially be loaded back into main memory). In Linux I usually add PSS and swap usage parsed from /proc, which should give correct numbers (PSS is an additive value). For example, all processes of Skype on my system take approximately 459 Mb in RAM and swap file. If you are only measuring one process memory instead of all and only private memory pages (excluding shared pages and swapped out) then you get the wrong number. I tried to search online what "Memory" column represents in Windows Task Manager and Mac Activity Monitor (which people often use to estimate memory usage), but couldn't find any information. So I cannot be sure that they show true values and that those values can be added to find total memory usage by several processes.

mattgreenrocks 5y ago

Pretty cool app, congrats on launching and building a userbase. Re: Electron comments: don't take those comments on Electron personally, it is just a means to an end. Personally I avoid Electron because the JS ecosystem makes me sad every time I touch it. But that's just me. :)

yboris 5y ago
Sure, when my project installs via npm it weighs in over 1GB, but when I bundle it up for distribution, the installer is around 65mb (Windows). TypeScript makes coding a super-pleasure, it's not your grandma's JS ;)