Technology

This is what bothers me so much... Browsers should be improving their PWA implementation (looking at you, Firefox) and electron apps should be PWAs more often. Another decent middle ground Is Tauri. SilverBullet and Yaak are both so much lighter and better than anything else on my system.

Or, even better, let’s start developing for separate platforms again, and optimise software for the platform that’s going to be running it. Rather than just developing everything for Chrome.

I wonder how much exact duplication each process has?

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/mm/ksm.html

Kernel Samepage Merging

KSM is a memory-saving de-duplication feature, enabled by CONFIG_KSM=y, added to the Linux kernel in 2.6.32. See mm/ksm.c for its implementation, and http://lwn.net/Articles/306704/ and https://lwn.net/Articles/330589/

KSM was originally developed for use with KVM (where it was known as Kernel Shared Memory), to fit more virtual machines into physical memory, by sharing the data common between them. But it can be useful to any application which generates many instances of the same data.

The KSM daemon ksmd periodically scans those areas of user memory which have been registered with it, looking for pages of identical content which can be replaced by a single write-protected page (which is automatically copied if a process later wants to update its content). The amount of pages that KSM daemon scans in a single pass and the time between the passes are configured using sysfs interface

KSM only operates on those areas of address space which an application has advised to be likely candidates for merging, by using the madvise(2) system call:

int madvise(addr, length, MADV_MERGEABLE)

One imagines that one could maybe make a library interposer to induce use of that.

I tried the PWA route with Discord. It wouldn't stay logged in, and acted generally janky. That said, I do PWA with any app that's Electron, at least to try and avoid the RAM bloat.

Memory hogging browsers usually do release memory when pressured. You can take it further by getting extensions that unload unused tabs.

The problem is electron apps that load the whole browser core over and over.