I feel like nobody cares too much if they’re running
one Electron app; people do have the headroom for an extra 1-2GB of RAM usage. The problem comes when they run
several Electron apps at once, and each comes with its own “base” overhead (i.e. the runtime memory consumption of the browser-runtime as a whole, independent of how many render contexts are open.)
Chromium is built to share a lot of things between tabs efficiently, but this economy-of-scale doesn’t translate over into having multiple instances of Chromium running. Each instance gets its own GPU renderer process + font-glyph tile cache, its own network-request cache (i.e. its own in-memory key-value store with its own LRU limit), etc. Running multiple Chromium instances at once is a bit like running multiple copies of an RDBMS on the same machine and expecting them to not fight over memory.
Does anyone know what exactly this “base” overhead in Chromium consists of; and, more importantly, how often it changes relative to Chromium releases? Because I’m wondering whether it’d be possible to factor most of it out into a separate layer from the highly-iterated-on “browser engine” DLL stuff (the renderer + DOM + JS layer) into its own sort of “Chromium Core Services” DLL, which could be relatively-more ABI-stable.
If you had that factoring-out, you could achieve a pretty good memory + CPU savings just by having Chromium + application frameworks like Electron all share one copy of the Chromium Core Services between them, while keeping their own higher-level “renderer+VM” DLL on top (which would hopefully be pretty stateless in terms of shared state, only adding the ~50MB mmap(2) overhead of the DLL-image itself, and then whatever memory the individual render-contexts consume.)
Alternately, of course, you could build Electron as a pseudo-browser where Electron “apps” are just separate windows running in its memory space, and the native Node processes are all just distinct V8 Execution Contexts in the same process. But 1. this would lose you the ability to develop for a particular version of the renderer, which is what Electron gains you over projects like Neutralino in the first place; and 2. this wouldn’t give you the benefit of Electron sharing service-memory with Chrome itself.