

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

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.<p>What is the cause of this? Is it AIR's fault? Is the application poorly written?
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codeslinger
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.

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gaius
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.

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kylecordes
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.

