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Comment by j4pe | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone compared memory usage of these launchers? I can report albert consumes a constant ~600MiB on my machine, which seems high for a list of filenames and application names.

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Alfred's (Mac) small memory footprint is partly because it delegates file searches to Mac built-in Spotlight (afaik). On Linux that might be more difficult to do since there's no standard solution for file search, apart from perhaps `locate`, which likely barely anyone uses anyway. IIRC Ubuntu/Gnome have a GUI-oriented solution in the vein of Spotlight—possibly ‘Tracker’—but dunno how widespread it is among the distros. At the least, Gnome and KDE probably require separate codepaths.

That does seem aggressively high. Alfred (MacOS), which this appears to take some design hints from, idles at about 49mb and 0.0-0.1% CPU usage on my Macbook.

Alfred’s compactness and efficiency is really something. Love how its updates start and finish in the time many programs take to load their “update available” dialogs.

Just checked on my machine and albert with quite a few plugins uses ~109 MB memory. I think that's very much in line with what to expect. Note also it does significantly more than just filenames and app names.

Albert allows you to write plugins in python (im not sure if that can be disabled), but presumably that would add the python interpreter to the memory food print.

Maybe it could use Akonadi on KDE and (gnome-)tracker on GTK based desktop?

(however, KRunner is fantastic, I would not know which KDE user would look for another solution)

I'm a KDE user, I switched over to KDE and brought my launcher with me. I should actually give KRunner a shot.

If you do, I'd be interested in your opinion then :-)

I just switched to it and am trying it out, but it doesn't seem to learn. I've typed "spo" to launch Spotify around 5-6 times, but it still lists "Spot" as the first choice.

I think you are right, might be worth opening a bug on bugzilla.kde.org to suggest/track the feature (having it, as an option maybe, would be cool).

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