Spotify uses 1GB of ram for me, while doing nothing, it was only started by mistake, it didn't play a song.

Slack was using 1.2 GB. It is in a workspaces but that seems a lot for an app that does nothing.

Postman I think is also Electron often uses 1-2GB for sending API requests.

Atom though was only using 200MB which is fair.

Signal is using 335MB for me right now, which feels ridiculous for a messaging app. I have Firefox running with over a thousand tabs (hard to tell how much RAM it's using with all the processes, many of which share memory, but my total system usage is around 8GB right now, so it's at least less than that), so I guess it's not scaling linearly from 8 tabs = 1.2GB. At any rate, Firefox does at least a couple orders of magnitude more things than Signal does; I think it's reasonable for it to use more RAM.

I think it's a bit weird to compare a chat app with a web browser, though, when it comes to memory usage. Maybe a better example: hexchat, a native GTK IRC client, is currently using 60MB of RAM. Telegram's native app using over 200MB is also ridiculous.

Because weechat uses <18 megs?

Does weechat support rich embedded media like images and videos, can you live stream games to your friends on it, talk with people, have profile avatars, use emotes, build bots that stream music to you?

Even something completely simple such as snip a portion of your screen and paste it in the chatbox so others can see it immediately, without having to mess around with dodgy image upload sites. This is basic functionality for 2022.

It's like comparing notepad.exe to Microsoft Word

How much of that needs to relate to the memory usage though? Embedded media doesn't need to be loaded besides what's visible in the current channel and perhaps a bit of scrollback, perhaps some text and scrollback for other frequently viewed channels. Livestreams also shouldn't be taking memory unless you're watching, same with voice. Avatars and emotes would certainly take memory, but certainly not hundreds of megabytes of it.

EDIT: ignore me, I thought this was about WeChat, the Chinese messaging app, not weechat, the IRC client :(

> rich embedded media like images and videos

Yes

> live stream games to your friends on it

no (there's WeChat livestream (idk what it's called in English), but it's not discord style stream-your-desktop)

> talk with people

yes

> have profile avatars

yes

> use emotes

yes

> build bots that stream music to you

yes

> Even something completely simple such as snip a portion of your screen and paste it in the chatbox so others can see it immediately, without having to mess around with dodgy image upload sites

yes? you can paste stuff into wechat just fine. Think WhatsApp, not IRC

Idk where GP came up with 18MB tho, it's eating up 100 on my laptop right now.

I've sent plenty of pictures over DCC in my day. OBS lets me stream whatever to wherever at unlimited quality without paying.

The point is most of what Discord provides is low value for the resources it demands.

I could do that in 2007 with 256 MB of RAM.

Part of the issue is that 64-bit programs end up taking close to twice as much memory, because pointers are twice as big, instructions are longer, etc.

Higher screen resolution uses more memory too.

I'm sure dependencies / libraries have grown in size too, and yeah, using web for UI takes memory.

Kopete, less than 100MB under KDE3 in ~2007. Video calls, emojis, inline LaTeX, Youtube videos...