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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

It's relative. Outlook is using 2.37 GB of RAM as I type this.

That too is relative. My copy of Thunderbird with 6 open emails from six open mailboxes is consuming about 170MB of memory right now, and that's hosting a fully-featured browser to view emails.

Granted, that's reserved memory, but that's the only memory you really need to worry about anyway.

Of course, native doesn't make a program automatically use less RAM. It does start with a lower footprint through, meaning that you can keep an eye on memory usage without relying on ugly hacks in your code.

That's odd, OUTLOOK.EXE is using 44MB of ram as I type this and has been open for 7 hours.

Same here, Outlook has been open from 9am > 4pm and it's using 64MB.

Maybe a Mac. My Outlook on mac is idling at 150MB.

Yes, this is Office 365 on macOS. Neither the computer nor Outlook have been restarted in weeks, which is surely contributing to its current RAM footprint.

Is it minimized? IIRC on Windows, when an application is minimized the working set is trimmed which can result in a significant reduction - but it jumps back up when you start using the application again.

   $ ps -eo rss,cmd |grep claws-mail|grep -v grep
   36016 claws-mail

37 MB, 4 accounts open, one of them holding ~10.000 messages (i.e. which need to be archived but it not being my account I'm not the one to do so)

Amazing. You must be 100 times more productive than the parent above whose mail app uses 2300 MB. You must be able to do soooo much more with such efficient tools.

Could you please follow the site guidelines so we don't have to ban you again?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's not relative at all. That's just awful.

Is it? Google Chrome and its associated process are using 5.1 GB of RAM. That's why it's tough for me personally to get worked up about 300 MB.

most people have computers with 4gb of ram

This.

Developers shouldn't be assuming that their users will have machines even close to theirs spec-wise.

And yet my Firefox with 48 open tabs and a bunch of addons is currently sitting at 1.2GB.

Chrome is awful with resource usage to begin with, which is why Electron is, it bundles and runs a headless Chrome for each Electron app.

Is that supposed to be acceptable?

It's not a judgement either way. I'm just noting that apps like Outlook and Chrome can eat GB of RAM, so Electron's overhead isn't a huge deal for me personally.

My outlook is using 183MB. Meanwhile, Spotify (an electron app) is using 467MB.

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