Submitted 3 weeks ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to technology@lemmy.world
I really wish Electron wasn’t as popular as it is. It’s such a fucking memory hog. I mean, sure, I’ve got RAM to spare, but I shouldn’t need that much for a single app.
Yes, it runs a separate browser instance for each electron program. Many of the programs that use it could just be a PWA instead.
This is what bothers me so much… Browsers should be improving their PWA implementation (looking at you, Firefox) and electron apps should be PWAs more often. Another decent middle ground Is Tauri. SilverBullet and Yaak are both so much lighter and better than anything else on my system.
I wonder how much exact duplication each process has?
www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/…/ksm.html
Kernel Samepage Merging
KSM is a memory-saving de-duplication feature, enabled by CONFIG_KSM=y, added to the Linux kernel in 2.6.32. See mm/ksm.c for its implementation, and lwn.net/Articles/306704/ and lwn.net/Articles/330589/
KSM was originally developed for use with KVM (where it was known as Kernel Shared Memory), to fit more virtual machines into physical memory, by sharing the data common between them. But it can be useful to any application which generates many instances of the same data.
The KSM daemon ksmd periodically scans those areas of user memory which have been registered with it, looking for pages of identical content which can be replaced by a single write-protected page (which is automatically copied if a process later wants to update its content). The amount of pages that KSM daemon scans in a single pass and the time between the passes are configured using sysfs interface
KSM only operates on those areas of address space which an application has advised to be likely candidates for merging, by using the madvise(2) system call:
int madvise(addr, length, MADV_MERGEABLE)
I tried the PWA route with Discord. It wouldn’t stay logged in, and acted generally janky. That said, I do PWA with any app that’s Electron, at least to try and avoid the RAM bloat.
Or, even better, let’s start developing for separate platforms again, and optimise software for the platform that’s going to be running it. Rather than just developing everything for Chrome.
maybe a toggle to choose between “take some extra RAM, I’m feeling generous” and “fuck you, I’m computing shit over here” could be used to let the app know your current mood / needs …
Memory hogging browsers usually do release memory when pressured. You can take it further by getting extensions that unload unused tabs.
The problem electron apps that load the whole browser core over and over.
Miss times when 4 gigs of ram was more than enough for browsing and playing game at the sane time
It still is if you’re willing to jump through enough hoops
cries in 8gb RAM
The proliferation of electron programs is what happens when you have a decade of annoying idiots saying “unused memory is wasted memory,” hand-in-hand with lazy developers or unscrupulous managers who are externalizing their development costs onto everybody else by writing inefficient programs that waste more and more of our compute and RAM, which necessitates the rest of us having to buy even better hardware to keep up.
annoying idiots saying “unused memory is wasted memory,”
The original intent of this saying was different, but ya it’s been co-opted into something else
So what was the original saying? As I see it, this phrase is wrong no matter how you look at it. Because all ram is used at all times, for example if you have 32GB of free ram, the kernel will use all of it as a page cache to speed up the file system. The more free ram you have the more files can be cached, avoiding access to the disk when you read them.
I normally reply with a tux penguin but, is it really a Windows problem if the it’s the apps that aren’t optimized for shit?
Indeed, and Electron is not specific to Windows
Yep. My 64 gigs of RAM died in my old setup a few weeks ago, and instead of paying out the ass for replacement DDR4 RAM, I decided to pay out the ass for DDR5 RAM and upgrade while I was at it. Only did 32 gigs, because I really wasn’t using most of my 64 gigs (I thought). A few days ago, I ended up having to set up a swap file because a Rust project I was working on kept crashing VSCode while it was running the analyzer. What are we doing here.
Windows itself is inherently unoptimized these days with its AI search powered start menu and settings pages that are actually electron web apps. Linux uses 3+ less gb of RAM on just desktop after I switched. So really it’s a both problem. Both windows and the programs need a rethink
I wouldn’t mind them all using HTML for UI if they’d learn to share the same one, and only load it when they need to show me something.
No, Razer, your “mouse driver” does not need to load Chrome at all times, when I’ll only ever look at it once.
No, Razer, your “mouse driver” does not need to load Chrome at all times, when I’ll only ever look at it once.
It’s funny; on Linux such devices work perfectly but many users complain that they “aren’t supported” because there’s no UI (that sits uselessly in your notification area and eats memory).
I guess the prices give us a new kind of issue ticket template; “new RAM is to expensive for me, please consider optimizing”
Electron should be a system dependency entirely so that every single app doesn’t have to be individually updated whenever there’s a chromium CVE which seems to be weekly.
We kinda have that already
Some frameworks/standard libs do support that, making use of OS webrendering capabilities.
For example MAUI WebView
WebView uses different browser engines on each platform to render web content:
- Windows: Uses WebView2, which is based on the Microsoft Edge (Chromium) browser engine. This provides modern web standards support and consistent behavior with the Edge browser.
- Android: Uses android.webkit.WebView, which is based on the Chromium browser engine. The specific version depends on the Android WebView system component installed on the device.
- iOS and Mac Catalyst: Uses WKWebView, which is based on the Safari WebKit browser engine. This is the same engine used by the Safari browser on iOS and macOS.
I remember how the combination of Internet mass distribution of file data and the blossoming gray market for file-share applications really super-charged the technology of file compression.
I wonder if we’ll see skyrocketing RAM prices put economic pressure on the system bloat rampant through modern OSes.
Isn’t the bloat basically being coded by the same ai that’s eating up the ram to begin with?
I mean, ymmv. The historical flood of cheap memory has changed developer practices. We used to code around keeping the bulk of our data on the hard drive and only use RAM for active calculations. We even used to lean on “virtual memory” on the disk, caching calculations and scrubbing them over and over again, in order to simulate more memory than we had on stick. SSDs changed that math considerably. We got a bunch of very high efficiency disk space at a significant mark up. But we used the same technology in our RAM. So there was a point at which one might have nearly as much RAM as ROM (had a friend with 1 GB of RAM on the same device that only had a 2 GB hard drive). The incentives were totally flipped.
I would argue that the low-cost, high-efficiency RAM induced the system bloat, as applications could run very quickly even on a fraction of available system memory. Meanwhile, applications that were RAM hogs appeared to run very quickly compared to applications that needed to constantly read off the disk.
Internet applications added to the incentive to bloat RAM, as you could cram an entire application onto a website and just let it live in memory until the user closed the browser. Cloud storage played the same trick. Developers were increasingly inclined to ignore the disk entirely. Why bother? Everything was hosted on a remote server, lots of the data was pre-processed on the business side, and then you were just serving the results to an HTML/Javascript GUI on the browser.
Now it seems like tech companies are trying to get the entire computer interface to be a dumb terminal to the remote data center. Our migration to phones and pads and away from laptops and desktops illustrates as much. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone finally makes consumer facing dumb-terminals a thing again - something we haven’t really experienced since the dawn of personal computers in the 1980s.
But TL; DR; I’d be more inclined to blame “bloat” on internet web browsers and low cost memory post '00s than on AI written-code.
It’s because people want cross-platform apps and web is the easiest way to do it. Yes, you have Flutter, KML or Qt but those are often hard to work with (looking at you, Flutter) or it’s difficult to find devs that can work with them. You choose web (JS/wasm) and you have plenty of devs familiar with the tools and you can support all the platform easily. I’m using Tauri for my personal projects because it’s fun and easy. I could use Qt but I don’t want to work with C++ or Python, at least not in my spare time. If anyone can recommend me a nice framework supporting Linux and Android and using modern language I might switch. I haven’t found one.
It’s because people want cross-platform apps and web is the easiest way to do it.
Just use the website then? There already is a suitable browser installed on every system. But no, people want apps. Makes it easier to stop people from having opinons about data collection and such. And the full browser stack needs to be fully reproduced each time. It gets really ridiculous when these apps sit idly in the notification area. Not to speak of security implications because electron apps and such usually don’t get timely updates.
Just use the website then?
It is a good solution for some apps but if you need to store data locally, use push notifications, run something in the background or access any native APIs you have to go with a native app.
WebBluetooth, WebUSB, WebSerial and the File System Access API aren’t universally available in Browsers for example.
Tauri would be a lesser evil compared to electron, but that then involves libwebkitgtk.
It’s because there is no such thing as optimisation anymore. Websites are bloated to the gills with terrible animations and tracking scripts.
I have been really enjoying working with Avalonia, it is a .NET library that works across windows, Linux, and Mac and allows you to use C# for desktop app development on those environments. Its what MAUI should have been.
Yeah I just can’t stop getting ragebaited by the Electron hate. All Electron haters are free to develop their own efficient, pleasant looking, cross-platform native app instead since it’s so easy
Windows Latest discovered Discord and other Chromium and Electron-based applications with high RAM usage
Lol, this is news? Where have they been the last 15 years?
In other news, the sky is blue.
Tauri is the way to go ; so that every app doesn’t each embed another web browser that makes for 90% of the file size.
Is the Rust backend mandatory?
In Tauri, the rust backend is the glue between web/js and OS functions. Yet you don’t need to do any rust code, it’s delivered ready.
Of course all must rust, return to the oxide!
Tauri doesn’t automatically make apps perform good. Easy and common pitfalls still can make it go to a crawl just like electron.
Yaak is an example of a tauri app that performs horribly, and that can’t reach a satisfactory 30fps on modern hardware. The issue is within how tauri interacts with the js world and syncs state.
Limitation breeds innovation
Just another AI agent bro, that will fix th
Out of Memory or System Resources. Close some windows or programs and try again.
VSCode history is so messed up. Microsoft buys github and stops production of github team’s IDE, then uses the framework developer for that IDE to make VSCode.
Fucking 1600s colonizer behavior.
No thanks. Any software that has AI integration as one of its main selling points is shitware imo.
Yeah, the RAM shortage is definitely to blame on Electron. Won’t someone please think of the poor AI companies who have to give an arm and a leg to get a single stick of RAM!
I wouldn’t mind so much if they were giving their own arms and legs, but they seem to be giving ours.
If you have a better way of generating videos of absurdly obese Olympic divers doing the bomb from a crane, I’d love to hear it.
Tbf isn’t AI mainly used to code electron apps by shitty companies?
And here I am resurrecting Dell laptops from 2010 with 1.5gb DDR RAM and Debian
I remember when they changed the backronym for Emacs from “Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping” to Eighty. Megabytes. Or when a Netscape developer was proud to overtake that memory use.
What’s the point of more RAM and faster processors if we just make applications that much less efficient?
“unused ram is wasted ram”
yeah yeah yeah, great. but all you motherfuckers did that and i’m fucking out of ram.
Native apps are so much better, on every platform.
The JavaScript must flow….
Traditions… Simple: download more ram
They only have DDR4 :/
Meanwhile, on my Linux system I use about 20% of my ram idling around and it doesn’t really budge
cough Windows START MENU cough cough
And the Apollo was launched with 4KB of ram.
Just for reference: My Current cpu (5700x3d) has more cache than my windows 98 computer had ram. And win98 wasn’t that bad.
Join Linux, ditches windows
I have an M1 Macbook Air with 8 gb of ram, it performs great for everything I want to do with it – except for the fact that a ”few” active browser tabs are enough to bring the memory pressure to the pain point. Editing HD video? Reasonably snappy for an old, base spec laptop. Browsing a news site? Potato.
This is a trade off. Many of these apps work on osx and Linux because they are browser-based. If they go back to native apps you lose that portability.
I mostly use terminal-based software on Linux.
I think that the only programs I use much that embed a web browser are:
Firefox
Steam
Some games that are Web-based and which I only run one of at once (Neo Scavenger, some RPGMaker-based games, probably some others).
Thank Google for those cool products.
This isn’t news lol
Way ahead of you Luddites
I have couple of old 8 gb sticks from my old 960 GPU pc. Is there any way for me to stick it onto my new pc and have only certain app use it and nothing else?
Electron is a f…ing cancer for Desktop
I’m tired of this! How can we start our own RAM foundry–is that the right term? Surely there’s a YT tutorial somewhere.
floofloof@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
If there’s any silver lining to this, perhaps we can get a renewed interest in efficient open-source software designed to work well on older hardware, and less e-waste.
Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Morgan Freeman: ”They couldn’t”
cenzorrll@piefed.ca 3 weeks ago
Open source developers are just like you and me. They’ll get fed up with the bullshit and start developing things they need with the resources they have, just like they’ve always done.
Ugurcan@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
If there’s a silver lining to this, fuck JavaScript, fuck JavaScript wrappers and fuck all people picked JavaScript for the programming language of anything cross-platform.
It’s unbelievable I would need 6 gbs of RAM to say a simple “hello” to my friends. It used to take 300kb on IRC.
Nenutzerbame@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
that has very little to do with JavaScript though 🤷♂️
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Even Electron apps aren’t necessarily ram hoarders: Stretchly, which is a break reminder and thus needs to always run in the background, takes something like 20 or 40 MB of memory.
neon_nova@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
I’d love to see games do this because they are clearly not being optimized. Can’t wait to see that not happen.
Good thing, I’m happy with retro games and the occasional indie.
mushroommunk@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
3/5 of the way through 100% Final Fantasy II. Figure by the time I catch up to modern final fantasy either hardware will be better again or people will optimize again. Either way I got time
tekato@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Why would you do that when you can pull 50 JavaScript libraries and wrap it in Electron?
InnerScientist@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
That’ll be 800€ and all change you own.
XLE@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
“It sounds like you want low-end devices to be turned into thin clients for cloud-based operating systems. Do I have that right?”
warm@kbin.earth 3 weeks ago
Why spend time making better software when the end user can just buy better hardware!
floofloof@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
That’s been the thinking for the last couple of decades at least. But it can’t continue if people can’t afford new hardware.
lostbit@feddit.nl 3 weeks ago
there are a shit ton alternatives. Too bad there are more average developers