[wander_homer]

Here on my systems (Ubuntu, Gentoo) electron-quick-start leads to ~90 MB more memory usage and it spawns 4 processes which use 110MB, 74MB, 74MB and 44MB of resident memory. So obviously quite some memory is shared between those and probably other processes on my system, but nevertheless the resulting memory consumption is far above 40 MB.

[tarruda]

I used gnome-system-monitor to check memory usage, which doesn't include the memory used by the executable image itself, and which I believe is more than 60 MiB.

Theoretically this memory could be shared by all electron applications running in a single machine. In practice every Electron app bundles its own runtime.

[LeoNatan25]

I tested on Mac and my numbers were higher. Even if some memory is shared between parent and child processes, each still has its own isolated VM, a DOM tree and a memory heap. So a lot of that is not shared.