I use priority inbox, so 100-150 emails a page. I keep a gmail always open, but even opening a new tab with gmail gets up to 750MB within a few seconds. I have a lot of extensions (40-50), latest ubuntu and chrome 56.
I turn email grouping off so 50 emails per page is just that. However, with email grouping and a 100 emails per page I could see it ballooning to 1GB depending on the content.
I just tried Edge and with 50 emails per page I'm seeing 398MB used by that process. Setting it to 100 emails increases it to 405MB.
How much memory is it with mutt, or Alpine.. or let's be fair, Thunderbird?
Thunderbird with a huge mail archive open: 1.5 G total, 500 M resident.
Does Thunderbird mmap it's mail archive or something? Because 1.5 GB sounds insane. Apple's Mail.app is only using 130 MB for a 1.8 GB mailbox. Might be an unfair comparison if Mail.app is leaning on the system for indexing/search (then again mds+mds_stores is using around 200 MB)
The metadata database for open folders is entirely resident in memory.
My mail box is currently 700 MB on disk and Thunderbird uses less than 100 MB of memory.
yea I was going to say, I know for a fact that I've never seen Gmail go above 500 Mb and I check multiple workstations throughout the day. Ours usually is around 2-300 mb most of the time. If it is 1GB...maybe there are some Gmail / Chrome extensions etc?
I use hangouts within gmail, could that be affecting it?
oh definitely, if it is within that tab then definitely yes. good call.