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> Anecdotes of Gmail tabs consuming multiple gigabytes of memory on resource-constrained laptops and desktops were being heard increasingly frequently You know
by corysama 12y ago
> Anecdotes of Gmail tabs consuming multiple gigabytes of memory on resource-constrained laptops and desktops were being heard increasingly frequently
You know, I think I recall being able to run quite nicely featured GUI mail clients and IRC clients simultaneously on a Pentium 90 with 16 megs of RAM. And, I expect those clients had an order of magnitude less developer effort put into them compared to the GMail client-side code. Meanwhile, I'm quite confident that Gmail team is composed of very, very smart developers. So, what am I missing? Why does GMail require two orders of magnitude more resources?
- wtetzner 12y agoI don't think it normally does. I think what probably happens is that there are memory leaks. The longer you leave the tab open, the more memory it ends up consuming. There's also the fact that it runs in the browser, which can make it more difficult to control or understand how many resources will be used.
- tambourine_man 12y agoI often make this kind of argument as well, but the demands we put an email client through these days are nowhere near what such a machine could handle. I have around 80.000 messages in my inbox, most of them with attachments around 10MB, and I can browse and search them instantly. Then again, I mostly use Gmail's backend, my preferred interface is Mail.app