In reality, I believe we're being let down by software developers who consider hardware resources like RAM and CPU as a free and unlimited resource. This includes web development.
Electron apps like Discord/Slack/MatterMost/VSCode/etc. are a good example of this. Or Windows 10 versus Linux (or even macOS).
This comes partly from the cloud-centric approach of "just scale up" instead of trying to optimise code. Lots of developers just want to throw more CPU/RAM at their inefficient code because "it's cheaper than the developer time to fix it" which is sort of true up to a point, until you have to hire a contractor to come in and reduce your AWS/GCP bill so you don't go out of business.
Honestly, web development has been exponentially worse than any other field of software development I have exposure to, including games. 90% of the time when I open task manager to figure out why things are so slow the answer is some Chrome tab. gMail is actually the culprit a shocking amount of the time. According to Chrome, my gMail tab is using more memory than Slack and Outlook combined and is an order of magnitude less responsive and reliable than either of those apps from my experience.
Absolutely, the bloat has grown far faster among web apps. A modern VR game with many GB of assets handling vastly more difficult computations at super low latency can often still fit in 8GB of memory.
It's mind blowing that trivial tasks like editing a google sheet document have come to consume even remotely comparable resources. Google sheets as it existed 8 years ago was snappier and more responsive while using far less memory.
There seems to be more competition among games than "productivity" software when it comes to performance. It begs the question of how bad things will continue to become before it starts affecting the bottom line.
VS Code gets a pass, it is a quasi-IDE, Electron or not, it is a heavyweight. Tough I still use Sublime Text for performance reasons.
Discord and Slack: no excuses. These are chat apps running in the background. There could be a client taking just kilobytes it there was a will for it.
Almost like those reasons for using Electron about developer productivity are really exaggerated. I wish they would invest in a few people to help optimize performance to improve UX, as it affects every one of their users.
That ridiculous purchase is fully on you, my friend. You would have been absolutely more than fine with 16GB, or even 32GB if you're scared.
But given that quadro, I feel like this wasn't at all a protest, but rather you do some sort of resource heavy work such as 3d simulations or rendering. Yes, these pursuits have always been resource intensive. No, it's not the fault of electron.
My 32GB, 2018 vintage work laptop is reporting 27 GB used, 4.13 cached, and 3.9GB swapped out.
I have two web browsers, VS code (remote mode only), and slack open. About 4GB is being used by corporate crapware. I use Firefox as a json viewer, so it’s using 0.5GB. Emacs is using 50MB and my imap client is using 260MB
Various UIs frequently hang waiting for swap. 32 GB is not enough, even though I’m using it like a dumb terminal.
I guess you're using Linux? Memory management for desktop applications is really sub-par compared to macOS or even Windows.
My 16Gb mac has zero problems with a comparable workload.
Nope, I don't do anything specialized, other than running some virtual machines while debugging and CI/CD pipelines. I've never exceeded 24 Gb of RAM in usage. At some point, I would like to run an small cloud infraestructure on this thing.
