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riffraff · 2022-05-26 23:27:31

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.

dnh44 | karma 993 | avg karma 1.95 · | 2021-08-14 04:53:35

I’ve got two macs, one from 2016 with 8gb of ram. Running a single electron app on that computer results in the rest of the system becoming totally unresponsive making any sort of multitasking impossible.

jacquesc | karma 1552 | avg karma 4.56 · | 2017-04-15 18:46:14+00:00

I'm currently using these Electron Apps every day: Slack, Nylas, VSCode, Insomonia, Freeter, Mongobooster

On a 2015 macbook pro with 16GB of RAM.

The buggiest and most resource intensive apps I use tend to be the native ones (iTunes, Dropbox, BusyCal, Evernote).

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Existenceblinks | karma 1097 | avg karma 0.95 · | 2020-11-11 06:37:15+00:00

I run a few Electron apps daily within 4GB RAM, it's (fine - 1); =~ almost fine lol.

gaius | karma 35963 | avg karma 2.51 · | 2017-08-17 20:11:30+00:00

My laptop is a 2008 MacBook Pro with a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo and 4G RAM. It's perfectly fine for running R Studio, Emacs, Python, Excel, Safari and VirtualBox with 1 or 2 VMs. Yet a trivial Electron app will make it crawl with the fan spinning like a jet about to take off.

zapzupnz | karma 2461 | avg karma 2.14 · | 2021-09-10 07:17:10

Electron apps run just fine on my 8 year old laptop. So long as there's only a couple of them at a time, mind you.

cm2187 | karma 24483 | avg karma 3.15 · | 2023-11-29 02:50:53

But I only have 16GB RAM, so I can only have a dozen of those electron apps open.

burtonator | karma 5913 | avg karma 5.76 · | 2019-04-19 14:09:00+00:00

God.. you guys HATE electron apps :-P

Those 150MB of RAM must really be killing you :-P

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wishinghand | karma 1638 | avg karma 2.19 · | 2018-12-07 08:55:10+00:00

Electron apps like Slack and VS Code tend to eat up my RAM capacity and CPU cycles. Whenever I quote everything except for Firefox my MacBook Pro calms its fans down.

rvz | karma 7775 | avg karma 1.08 · | 2021-03-26 18:45:17

On top of that with many tabs open, you probably have 20+ Electron apps open all competing for RAM on your Macbook.

Complete waste of CPU, Memory and Disk space. A triple negative for all software.

Might as well download more RAM, since Chrome and these Electron apps are having a huge RAM-eating feast on my computer. /s

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jayeshsalvi | karma 936 | avg karma 7.8 · | 2017-03-05 03:28:59+00:00

It's not Electron that has performance issues, but the apps aren't probably coded properly. I've been developing my app using electron for a year now and haven't seen it hog cpu/memory unless it's a bug in my application.

leonroy | karma 1410 | avg karma 3.11 · | 2017-07-13 20:43:29

Yeah it's pretty shocking how much CPU and memory Electron apps use.

Used to be Java chat apps and IDEs (Eclipse, IntelliJ) were considered slow and bloated.

They're practically fleet footed compared to the new breed of web apps.

As much as I love Slack, Visual Studio Code and Atom my maxed out MacBook Pro is at 50-100% CPU and paging into swap with all three open.

If I send a few GIFs in Slack - temps hit 99C (never 100 for some reason) and my laptop sounds like a mini hovercraft.

It's a little disheartening and really has me missing those big old Mac Pros which were silent no matter the task.

JavaScript and the resulting apps are certainly enjoyable to code and use but damn does something need to change in terms of resource utilization.

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mananvaghasiya | karma 46 | avg karma 2.3 · | 2016-05-26 09:20:45+00:00

This is good and all but anyone else see a problem with electron apps for everything? all these apps built with electron really clogging my ram.

wingerlang | karma 2667 | avg karma 1.13 · | 2017-01-17 15:38:37

I think he is saying that electron apps are bad because they are so power hungry.

I'm using a 2008 macbook as well and I don't have any huge problems with most apps. I do stay away from web-tech-based apps as much as I can though.

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msbarnett | karma 12236 | avg karma 5.89 · | 2016-03-16 22:35:43+00:00

It's not just RAM, either. If you measure "energy usage" however your OS allows you to (powertop or OS X's Activity Monitor, etc), Electron-based apps are absolute battery killers.

You'll lose literally hours of battery life simply by running Atom instead of Sublime. It's absurd how little regard Electron devs are showing for end-user resources.

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Karunamon | karma 16796 | avg karma 2.2 · | 2019-08-12 22:24:05

The problem with regard to RAM consumption is the tragedy of the commons. One electron app is okay, but once you're running up to ten or more of them, the resource usage gets out of hand.

nu11ptr | karma 2805 | avg karma 6.49 · | 2022-10-13 09:10:14

Interesting - it runs rather nice for an electron app IMO. Also, the memory utilization isn't terrible (so far that I have noticed).

purple-dragon | karma 198 | avg karma 1.72 · | 2016-11-02 18:04:27+00:00

I like Electron apps too, and I am running a handful of them as I type this message, but they are notorious for hogging system resources (especially memory).

mr_custard | karma 344 | avg karma 4.71 · | 2019-02-05 01:22:01+00:00

Perhaps it's down to hardware differences then, assuming that you've got a newish machine. This is a fairly old MacBook Pro which will be replaced soon. Hard to say what the cause is, but I don't have any issues with other non-Electron apps.

jeromegv | karma 4590 | avg karma 4.0 · | 2022-02-16 10:47:12

Anyone with a system that is running full of Electron apps knows how awful it adds up and how slow they are. Sure just 1 app makes hardly a difference. But I have 16GB of RAM and it gets awfully slow very fast with all that electron mess.