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I'm a happy Backblaze customer, but I've noticed it typically uses around 240MB of memory. Is this normal? Why is it so high?

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BrianW from Backblaze here. That is a little high, but is plausible in some installations. When running Backblaze on a laptop, you will notice a couple different processes running. "bzserv" should always be very very small, it doesn't do much. When you see "bztransmit", that is the process that reads your files from disk, encrypts them in RAM, and transmits them to the Backblaze datacenter. It tends to be about 30 MBytes of executable code, plus up to another 30 MBytes of the file being encrypted in RAM and transmitted. So most customers will see bztransmit bounce around at 60 MBytes RAM.

HOWEVER, there are short moments when bztransmit must read a list of files into RAM, and it can reach larger sizes like 240 MBytes. bztransmit does the deduplication, which means it must store one SHA-1 of every file it has transmitted from your computer to our datacenter. If you have a lot of files that have been transmitted (over 1 million files is "a lot") then Backblaze might reach 200 MBytes in size.

The current desktop client runs atop a JVM

Their web page disagress with you:

"No Java Software Java is responsible for 91% of security attacks. Backblaze's code is native to Mac and PC and doesn't use Java."*

It even has a big logo with Java logo crossed out.

I'm pretty sure their clients are all native.

Backblaze engineer here -> we absolutely DO NOT use a JVM on the client running on laptops. We love Java and use it in the datacenter on every web server and every pod. The reason we don't use it on the client running on laptops is twofold:

1) Java doesn't deploy super smoothly - The initial download might be 30 MBytes to include the JVM instead of 1 or 2 MBytes for a 'C' executable. Also, you have to keep updating the JVM separately, etc. It's friction to customers.

2) Java is hard to make look "native". Macintosh/Apple customers especially are sensitive to the look and feel of applications and like them to feel extremely "native".

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