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by zdragnar 1491 days ago
Meh, I keep multiple electron apps, node processes, and chrome windows and tabs open at the same time, and they're really not at all CPU intensive (except for node running tsc builds or tests). It's the RAM usage that is annoying, and even that isn't too terrible.

Edit: of course, I'm running swaywm on linux, so my environment is generally pretty light as it is compared to Windows.
2 comments
Syonyk 1491 days ago
I generally try to use ARM small board computers as much as possible. They really struggle with running a bunch of Electron stuff at the same time, and while you can reasonably use some modern websites on them, it's amazing just how much absolute crap you can get rid of with NoScript/Ghostery/etc, and still have a perfectly functional website.

My massive, powerful, "Do absolutely everything!" computer in college was a dual Pentium III 866, with 768MB RAM. And a hex core, 2GHz ARM box with 4GB RAM can't do half as much, because of just how heavily bloated software is. I still write code, browse the web, chat with people... and I need radically more resources because that's what software development has decided is easy. Meanwhile, stuff like Hexchat for IRC just... uses no resources and works as wonderfully as ever.

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zdragnar 1491 days ago
I'm guessing RAM is your limiting factor. I've got about 20 tabs open across two chrome windows (separate profiles) and I'm using less than 3gb for my entire system. CPU usage is basically nil since I'm not doing much at the moment but typing.

Throwing slack / spotify / vscode / steam / whatever else on top of that could easily bump it up several more gb. VScode is pretty good, up until you start adding in language servers. The quality of the rest is really hit or miss.

Edit: Out of curiosity, I opened steam, and it immediately took up a little bit of ram, then by the time it finished "loading" it ballooned up to a gig- presumably because of all the fancy animated images and video players and what not the storefront needs. I could definitely do without those things, though I imagine they do correlate to more purchases (there's a name for it, I forget- something about moving images triggering a capture of attention going back to hunting / fight or flight response).

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ticviking 1491 days ago
I strongly suspect that we have stopped trying to reduce bloat. The cost in engineering time cannot be sustained. As a dev I can't even afford the time to optimize my local development machine to reduce bloat.
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riffraff 1491 days ago
Multiple electron apps run just fine on my 2015 MacBook pro too. Yes the ram usage is annoying but it's not unusable.

OTOH my battery is dying, and may not be worth replacing.

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