[manigandham]

Extreme statements aren't useful.

GMail is a poorly built app, that's all. There are plenty of great examples. Both Outlook and Fastmail have fast and feature-rich email clients. Gmail was good back in the day and got carried away by project managers and feature creep.

Meanwhile Google Docs continues to be a pinnacle of what you can achieve on the web.

[userbinator]

My experience with the Outlook web app (not the "basic HTML" mode, which is perfectly usable in contrast) is the exact opposite --- it's extremely slow and consumes a ridiculous amount of memory for what it does (I've seen it take over 2GB of RAM, and this is with an account where all the emails with their attachments total less than 100MB.) When composing a message it lags so much that it will delay each keystroke by several seconds and drop keys intermittently, and I have resorted to writing in a real (native) text editor and copy-pasting. In contrast, the native client has memory usage in the dozens of MB and is far more responsive --- I've never experienced it being sluggish to that extent.

[cookiengineer]

What I wish for every Christmas is that web developers across the globe finally learn that syncing a draft server-side onkeyup is the worst idea, and it should never be pursued in implementing it.

Reality has rtt and shitty 2G slow, and will drive people away from your web product if you are too silly to cache things locally.

[manigandham]

Unused RAM is wasted RAM. If you don't have anything else that needs it then just let your system automatically handle it.

Also I find most performance issues with big apps are a result of browser extensions that interfere. Try using a private window without any extensions.

[modo_mario]

>Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

Says the OS developer, says the browser developer, says the webapp developer, says the developer of whatever else you have running. Developer time is expensive. Says one. Look it runs fine and is snappy. Says another on his maxed out development pc forgetting about his grandma. Why should i care about that extra memory load when most pc's nowadays have x amount. Says yet another.

And so the slugfest continues.

>Also I find most performance issues with big apps are a result of browser extensions that interfere. Try using a private window without any extensions.

Browser extensions can definitely make a browser sluggish but most don't interfere with the content. The only ones that do AND are common are adblockers which have a tendency of making it less sluggish.

[Lev1a]

Vacuuming up RAM while all the other applications have to fight over the leftover scraps or wait for paging to get the data from disk (1) is NOT a good thing as much as Electron-zealots want to normalize running a multi-GB browser instance for every single application.

(1): burning through an SSD's limited number of write cycles OR being at least an order of magnitude slower to access in the case of HDDs

[ShroudedNight]

Who says it was otherwise unused? Web apps aren't used in isolation, the additional RAM you're using to speed things up by 3% has caused my code look-ups to slow down by 30% because you've consumed what was my file cache.

[Dylan16807]

> Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

Bloat RAM is also wasted RAM. If it's not being used as a cache of reasonable size, or in a time/speed tradeoff, all you're doing is making things worse.

> If you don't have anything else that needs it then just let your system automatically handle it.

That's a statement that only really applies to people misunderstanding RAM used by the page cache or suspended programs. And both of those depend on active applications not allocating that memory!

[mycall]

> I've seen it take over 2GB

Probably because that RAM wasn't doing anything else. Why not use it as cache to speed things up. I'm sure it can work fine in much smaller RAM sizes.

[Dylan16807]

It's very rare that a program intelligently adjusts its cache size based on the amount of memory available.

And that doesn't explain how the "cache" is twenty times bigger than the source data.

I bet with less RAM available it would start thrashing.

[userbinator]

The fact that my machine was swapping heavily whenever I tried to switch to the Outlook tab or do anything with it says otherwise.