Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by maerek 3152 days ago
Not sure what I'm missing here, but I see Signal using 37.5MB of memory. That doesn't seem egregious, but I'm also not familiar with what other Electron apps use.
1 comments

I don't think you're looking at all the processes:

A fresh launch without logging in or having it run for any period of time immediately uses 211.2MB:

  1. Signal: 58.3MB
  2. Signal Helper: 128.6MB
  3. Signal Helper: 24.3MB
After logging in and starting a few conversations I quickly see the total rise to over 350MB.
Memory usage isn't well understood. If you are using Activity Monitor on OSX the memory tab doesn't tell you much. Double click the process and look at the "Real memory size". That's a much more accurate picture of the physical ram being used by the process. It is typically much less than what you see on the memory tab overview.
It is by me, that is the real memory usage, pretty shocking.
tbh even that is inaccurate because Chromium uses shared memory heavily. The most real'est way to see is to note the total free memory, close the app, then subtract.