Ask HN: Why does TweetDeck consume as much RAM as my web browser?

5 points·jganetsk··3 comments

TweetDeck is the number 1 Twitter application on the Internet. I've got it open right now, and it is consuming more RAM than Chrome with 5 tabs open. 86 MB. That's enough to store 644,000 purely ASCII tweets. Granted, TweetDeck has to store user images as well as text, but I only follow 38 people.

What is the cause of this? Is it AIR's fault? Is the application poorly written?

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IMHE, all AIR apps "leak" over time (meaning, absorb more and more RSS as time goes on). This is regardless of whether they were written with Flash/Flex or HTML/JavaScript or a combination. I wrote a really small AIR app (one pane with some JavaScript, no images or other media) and it starts off at 100MB on boot and continues on until I kill it at well over 350MB RSS a day or two later. TweetDeck, Twhirl, FriendDeck, etc, they all leak for me, too, on both Mac and Linux.

It's insane when you consider what AIR applications actually do. The Facebook AIR client polls your newsfeed for updates and displays them in a rich text widget - 150M resident on this Windows PC after a few hours use. To put that into perspective I have a Tcl/Tk app that does more things (not FB, internal data feeds) running in 7M resident, no leaks.

I don't see AIR as being usable for any "real" applications which are often left running for days at a time, and are far more complex. Still, hats off to Adobe for inventing something more ridiculously overblown than Java desktop apps.

I'm not much of a Twitter user; but if I was, I'd look for a lightweight native Twitter client application. AIR is slick, but even at todays (very low) RAM prices I can't bring myself to use an always-resident AIR app.

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