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I am currently at war with google docs and notion re: memory usage. gmail takes something like half a gigabyte of memory. I had a notion database where each tim

I am currently at war with google docs and notion re: memory usage. gmail takes something like half a gigabyte of memory. I had a notion database where each time it loaded an additional 25 rows, memory use went up 400MB. It only got up to 200-300 rows total before it died. I gave up Sublime because of memory usage, but the alternatives aren't much better. I'm getting ready to trade in my 8gb Mac for 24gb to help with this, and if I could get more without having to pony up for a CPU I don't need, I'd get 32gb, or even 64gb.

jusssi 3y ago
To be fair, 8gb hasn't been quite enough for most dev work since containers and VMs became a standard way for local builds and runs.
- miroljub 3y ago
  I don't think it's an excuse for Notion. It's not like it's spinning a new container for each and every database row.
  - wlesieutre 3y ago
    You never know, maybe that's their row microservice.
    - sgt 3y ago
      Or the overheads for communication between the row and column services, the latter being spun up dynamically based on the column count.
      - RexM 3y ago
        I can no longer detect satire
- tivert 3y ago
  >> I gave up Sublime because of memory usage, but the alternatives aren't much better. I'm getting ready to trade in my 8gb Mac for 24gb to help with this, and if I could get more without having to pony up for a CPU I don't need, I'd get 32gb, or even 64gb. > To be fair, 8gb hasn't been quite enough for most dev work since containers and VMs became a standard way for local builds and runs. It's 2023, and as a typical software developer, I think it's pretty reasonable to require a minimum of 16GB of RAM to just edit text. /s
  - mynameisvlad 3y ago
    “You silly kids and your 16GB of RAM! Back in my day, we got by with 32KB!” The reality is that software is increasingly more complex and even simple tasks require more and more resources as the cruft builds up.
    - naikrovek 3y ago
      yeah I'd like to see MS-DOS edit.exe do what sublime does, or open files larger than 16kB or whatever the limit was for that thing. very light memory usage though, so modern software is obviously so much worse.
    - tivert 3y ago
      > “You silly kids and your 16GB of RAM! Back in my day, we got by with 32KB!” Did I say everything should run in 32KB of RAM? I did not. Perhaps now you can be serious instead of sarcastically and tendentiously avoiding the topic of discussion? It's reasonable for a text editor to use far more than 32KB of RAM, but it's not reasonable for one to not run well on a system with 8GB of RAM (unless the user is editing some massive files). > The reality is that software is increasingly more complex... That's true, but also vastly overstated as an excuse for laziness and lack of care. > ...and even simple tasks require more and more resources as the cruft builds up. Now you're getting somewhere. There's no good excuse for most modern programs requiring so many resources. The reason is software engineers are actually terrible at their jobs, and the profession (and its backers) embrace a lot of terrible ideas and excuses. Among other things, the end result is programs that (seemingly more often than not) expand to waste the resources available until performance drops to the minimum acceptable.
- tornato7 3y ago
  I do heavy dev work on an 8GB M1 Mac. Like, dozens of Chrome tabs, multiple IDEs, Notion, Slack, etc. Works great. MacOS does a good job at compressing memory and using swap. The SSD on an M1 Mac is basically DDR2 speed, so even if you're mostly running on swap programs still execute fast enough.
klodolph 3y ago
Consider BBEdit. I’ve been using it a lot more these days, now that its competition has skyrocketed in CPU / memory.
- Aloha 3y ago
  BBEdit has been my go to for a long time, as a person who came from Windows, it was a good replacement for Notepad++. I'd love to buy it, but while I'd be happy to pay 99 bucks for a perpetual version with upgrades, I'm not willing to pay 50 dollars every unknown amount of time. Even if I might pay that for a known 5 years worth of updates.
rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 3y ago
How many of these problems can be overcome by simply running the tools in the browser and not as standalone apps?
- soci 3y ago
  For electron-based tools that were designed as web-first apps, I agree with you that it's better to have them in a browser tab than as standalone apps. However, for real desktop tools that utilize the operating system's bells and whistles, which truly make an app a desktop app—like Sublime—I'd never use an alternative in the browser.
  - RunSet 3y ago
    > However, for real desktop tools that utilize the operating system's bells and whistles, which truly make an app a desktop app—like Sublime—I'd never use an alternative in the browser. I such cases I would also never favor an Electron app posing as native software.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- gcanyon 3y ago
  In Safari or Chrome, none of them. Arc seems somewhat resistant to large memory grab issues, but the Notion database kills it as well.
leosanchez 3y ago
I thought Sublime was one of the efficient ones
- jmull 3y ago
  I think it is, or at least I use it all day every day and its memory usage is good for me.
- yakubin 3y ago
  Theoretically it is, but on one Linux computer I have it freezes from time to time, whereupon it stops redrawing frames, resizing the window results in gray rectangles etc. I think it’s caused by a slower disk, which is sad, because I don’t think that’s a legitimate reason for a UI to stop working. I can accept having to wait when opening a file, but the UI completely freezing is unacceptable. I typically close and open it again in those situations. It still has a faster fuzzy file search than anything available in Emacs, which is why I stick with it.
- m3h 3y ago
  I second this. Sublime text is one of the faster text editors out there. It boots fast enough that I use it as my go-to notes app.
  - gcanyon 3y ago
    It’s fine, speed-wise, but I saw enough memory usage to look for alternatives.
droopyEyelids 3y ago
For the gmail issue, I feel like I might as well plug http://mimestream.com http://mimestream.com, a gmail client that is a pleasure to use & efficient.
- linux2647 3y ago
  And written using Mac APIs, not Electron
- yumraj 3y ago
  Might have considered it, but saw the subscription-only pricing and left. General unsolicited advice to desktop application vendors: unless you have the market size and monopoly of Adobe, Microsoft etc, go with one off pricing.
  - TheNewsIsHere 3y ago
    I tend to apply this thinking to my software purchases as well, but in the spirit of conversation I’ll offer that I also make exceptions for software I find to be 1) fantastically good _and independent_, or 2) only make sense with an Internet connection and/or requires or includes some kind of vendor-specific remote service.
cztomsik 3y ago
TLDR; do not trust Activity Monitor. > I gave up Sublime because of memory usage Isn't this just because of GPU-mapped memory/textures? Because you can't get much better with any other app, for example text-rendering is not a solved problem yet, there are few nice tricks but they always come with some tradeoff so if you want to support non-english scripts, you usually just go with glyph atlas which needs to include 1:1 glyph-size (retina is big) + up to 3 extra variations because of kerning for each used glyph. System apps do not report this if they are using cocoa but a similar overhead is still there. Or because of the emoji font, which alone takes 200M!!! And if your app opens it (just to support emojis, not necessarily to draw them), it gets reported as its own memory even when it's usually mmapped and shared between processes (and might not even be loaded in the memory). What kind of memory usage are we talking about? And how did you measure?
- gcanyon 3y ago
  Sublime with no windows open: 410mb of memory CotEditor with no windows open: 80mb of memory BBEdit with no windows open: 85mb of memory In the Activity Monitor.
  - cztomsik 3y ago
    So? 410M is reported, it does not mean it's actually used. I'm not sure if you are familiar with how virtual memory works but if you are, then I don't understand what's your point.
  - jmull 3y ago
    I guess it varies... I have ~50 files open in sublime right now, mostly small, but some fairly large (e.g. one is 600K), and I'm seeing 279MB in activity monitor. It was less, but I cycled through all my open files just to keep it honest. Of course, there are a million different workflows people use, not to mention different plug-ins and language packages, etc., so it may just not work for you. But I don't think there's really an inherent problem.
    - gcanyon 3y ago

jusssi 3y ago

To be fair, 8gb hasn't been quite enough for most dev work since containers and VMs became a standard way for local builds and runs.

miroljub 3y ago
I don't think it's an excuse for Notion. It's not like it's spinning a new container for each and every database row.
- wlesieutre 3y ago
  You never know, maybe that's their row microservice.
  - sgt 3y ago
    Or the overheads for communication between the row and column services, the latter being spun up dynamically based on the column count.
    - RexM 3y ago
      I can no longer detect satire
tivert 3y ago
>> I gave up Sublime because of memory usage, but the alternatives aren't much better. I'm getting ready to trade in my 8gb Mac for 24gb to help with this, and if I could get more without having to pony up for a CPU I don't need, I'd get 32gb, or even 64gb. > To be fair, 8gb hasn't been quite enough for most dev work since containers and VMs became a standard way for local builds and runs. It's 2023, and as a typical software developer, I think it's pretty reasonable to require a minimum of 16GB of RAM to just edit text. /s
- mynameisvlad 3y ago
  “You silly kids and your 16GB of RAM! Back in my day, we got by with 32KB!” The reality is that software is increasingly more complex and even simple tasks require more and more resources as the cruft builds up.
  - naikrovek 3y ago
    yeah I'd like to see MS-DOS edit.exe do what sublime does, or open files larger than 16kB or whatever the limit was for that thing. very light memory usage though, so modern software is obviously so much worse.
  - tivert 3y ago
    > “You silly kids and your 16GB of RAM! Back in my day, we got by with 32KB!” Did I say everything should run in 32KB of RAM? I did not. Perhaps now you can be serious instead of sarcastically and tendentiously avoiding the topic of discussion? It's reasonable for a text editor to use far more than 32KB of RAM, but it's not reasonable for one to not run well on a system with 8GB of RAM (unless the user is editing some massive files). > The reality is that software is increasingly more complex... That's true, but also vastly overstated as an excuse for laziness and lack of care. > ...and even simple tasks require more and more resources as the cruft builds up. Now you're getting somewhere. There's no good excuse for most modern programs requiring so many resources. The reason is software engineers are actually terrible at their jobs, and the profession (and its backers) embrace a lot of terrible ideas and excuses. Among other things, the end result is programs that (seemingly more often than not) expand to waste the resources available until performance drops to the minimum acceptable.
tornato7 3y ago
I do heavy dev work on an 8GB M1 Mac. Like, dozens of Chrome tabs, multiple IDEs, Notion, Slack, etc. Works great. MacOS does a good job at compressing memory and using swap. The SSD on an M1 Mac is basically DDR2 speed, so even if you're mostly running on swap programs still execute fast enough.

klodolph 3y ago

Consider BBEdit. I’ve been using it a lot more these days, now that its competition has skyrocketed in CPU / memory.

Aloha 3y ago
BBEdit has been my go to for a long time, as a person who came from Windows, it was a good replacement for Notepad++. I'd love to buy it, but while I'd be happy to pay 99 bucks for a perpetual version with upgrades, I'm not willing to pay 50 dollars every unknown amount of time. Even if I might pay that for a known 5 years worth of updates.

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 3y ago

How many of these problems can be overcome by simply running the tools in the browser and not as standalone apps?

soci 3y ago
For electron-based tools that were designed as web-first apps, I agree with you that it's better to have them in a browser tab than as standalone apps. However, for real desktop tools that utilize the operating system's bells and whistles, which truly make an app a desktop app—like Sublime—I'd never use an alternative in the browser.
- RunSet 3y ago
  > However, for real desktop tools that utilize the operating system's bells and whistles, which truly make an app a desktop app—like Sublime—I'd never use an alternative in the browser. I such cases I would also never favor an Electron app posing as native software.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gcanyon 3y ago
In Safari or Chrome, none of them. Arc seems somewhat resistant to large memory grab issues, but the Notion database kills it as well.

leosanchez 3y ago

I thought Sublime was one of the efficient ones

jmull 3y ago
I think it is, or at least I use it all day every day and its memory usage is good for me.
yakubin 3y ago
Theoretically it is, but on one Linux computer I have it freezes from time to time, whereupon it stops redrawing frames, resizing the window results in gray rectangles etc. I think it’s caused by a slower disk, which is sad, because I don’t think that’s a legitimate reason for a UI to stop working. I can accept having to wait when opening a file, but the UI completely freezing is unacceptable. I typically close and open it again in those situations. It still has a faster fuzzy file search than anything available in Emacs, which is why I stick with it.
m3h 3y ago
I second this. Sublime text is one of the faster text editors out there. It boots fast enough that I use it as my go-to notes app.
- gcanyon 3y ago
  It’s fine, speed-wise, but I saw enough memory usage to look for alternatives.

droopyEyelids 3y ago

For the gmail issue, I feel like I might as well plug http://mimestream.com http://mimestream.com, a gmail client that is a pleasure to use & efficient.

linux2647 3y ago
And written using Mac APIs, not Electron
yumraj 3y ago
Might have considered it, but saw the subscription-only pricing and left. General unsolicited advice to desktop application vendors: unless you have the market size and monopoly of Adobe, Microsoft etc, go with one off pricing.
- TheNewsIsHere 3y ago
  I tend to apply this thinking to my software purchases as well, but in the spirit of conversation I’ll offer that I also make exceptions for software I find to be 1) fantastically good _and independent_, or 2) only make sense with an Internet connection and/or requires or includes some kind of vendor-specific remote service.

cztomsik 3y ago

TLDR; do not trust Activity Monitor. > I gave up Sublime because of memory usage Isn't this just because of GPU-mapped memory/textures? Because you can't get much better with any other app, for example text-rendering is not a solved problem yet, there are few nice tricks but they always come with some tradeoff so if you want to support non-english scripts, you usually just go with glyph atlas which needs to include 1:1 glyph-size (retina is big) + up to 3 extra variations because of kerning for each used glyph. System apps do not report this if they are using cocoa but a similar overhead is still there. Or because of the emoji font, which alone takes 200M!!! And if your app opens it (just to support emojis, not necessarily to draw them), it gets reported as its own memory even when it's usually mmapped and shared between processes (and might not even be loaded in the memory). What kind of memory usage are we talking about? And how did you measure?

gcanyon 3y ago
Sublime with no windows open: 410mb of memory CotEditor with no windows open: 80mb of memory BBEdit with no windows open: 85mb of memory In the Activity Monitor.
- cztomsik 3y ago
  So? 410M is reported, it does not mean it's actually used. I'm not sure if you are familiar with how virtual memory works but if you are, then I don't understand what's your point.
- jmull 3y ago
  I guess it varies... I have ~50 files open in sublime right now, mostly small, but some fairly large (e.g. one is 600K), and I'm seeing 279MB in activity monitor. It was less, but I cycled through all my open files just to keep it honest. Of course, there are a million different workflows people use, not to mention different plug-ins and language packages, etc., so it may just not work for you. But I don't think there's really an inherent problem.
  - gcanyon 3y ago