Comment by vacuity
2 days ago
It seems like you're saying that if the user acts in certain patterns, the OS will just take care of it. Isn't the point of computers and technology to make it so that users are less restricted and more empowered? If many people do actually notice performance issues particularly around usage of certain apps, then your recommended patterns are too narrow for practicality. You are talking about scenarios where there is no real pressure, the happy path, but that's not realistic.
I’m just saying that it would not make much difference if Electron reduced its idle memory usage. If you use an app infrequently, then it will get paged out and the memory it retains in its idle state will be available for other processes. If you use the app frequently then you care about active memory usage more than idle memory usage. Either way, there is not much to be gained by reducing idle memory usage. Any attempt to reduce it might just increase the wake up time of the app, which might then have to rebuild various data structures that could otherwise have been efficiently compressed or cached to disk by the OS.
You're still going off of a "happy path" mentality. The user decides when an app should be idle or active, not the OS. The OS therefore pages in and out with no grand scheme and may be out of sync with the user's next action. What of the time taken to page in an idle app's working set? Or, as I addressed from the start, what if the user wants many applications open and there is not much free memory? That means swapping becomes a necessity and not a luxury, performance drops, and user experience declines. I think there is plenty of, perhaps low-hanging is uncharitable, but not unreasonably high fruit to pick so that users can be more comfortable with whatever workload they desire. I don't think we're remotely pushing the limits of the technology here.
You seem to be thinking about memory usage in general and not specifically about memory usage in an idle state, which is what I’ve been talking about in this thread.
Otherwise, what exactly is the alternative you have in mind? Should Electron release allocations manually after a certain period of inactivity and then rebuild the relevant data structures when woken up again? For the reasons I gave above, I suspect that the result of that would be a reduction in overall performance, even if notional memory usage were reduced.
If you just say “Electron should use less RAM overall!” then you are not talking about the specific issue of memory usage in an idle state; you are talking about memory usage in general.
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