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Is MacOS getting worse or are too many Electron apps to blame?

3 points by stanfieldecho ↗ HN
I had a Mac Pro (16gb ram, 6 cores) that was less than two years old and went in circles with Apple support but Apple could not figure out why my computer kept freezing up. So eventually I bought a new iMac with 32gb ram and 4 cores.

Before my Mac Pro I owned an old iMac with only 8gb ram and 2 cores, and only ran 1-2 Electron apps plus chrome and never had problems.

I use chrome and between 4 to 5 Electron apps that I know of on a daily basis now days and keep at least 3 open all day. Today my new iMac froze up just like my Mac Pro did. So, my question is (and could be a false dichotomy), is MacOS to blame here or Electron? Why would a brand new iMac freeze up? I've owned plenty of Macs over the ages and only had freezes when I would spin up a virtual machine running Ubuntu--and even then the freezes were not common.

6 comments

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platinumrad
I use a relatively old Macbook that wasn't particularly powerful when it came out (i5, 8Gb). The only time the fans spin up is when cargo needs to compile a billion dependencies for some crate that probably doesn't even need half of them. I use zero electron apps.

It's probably the electron apps.

>I had a Mac Pro (16gb ram, 6 cores) that was less than two years old(!!!) and went in circles with Apple support but Apple could not figure out why my computer kept freezing up. So eventually I bought a new iMac with 32gb ram and 4 cores.

Why would you throw more money at Apple if their support wasn't even able to address your concerns...

stanfieldecho
The way I rationalized it was that if I went with something like Ubuntu on a PC I would be on my own if something broke, so that's why I pathetically went with Apple again.
platinumrad
That's fair--MacOS is still the king of "it just works", most of the time. But hardware lasts a very long time these days, even if it sometimes seems like developers are trying their hardest to ruin that for us.
stephenr
How many Chrome tabs? Which Electron Apps?

I don't use Chrome, and I specifically avoid Electron apps. My daily machine is a 2011 (YES, 7 years old) MBP 17". It has a quad core i7 @ 2.4GHz and 16GB RAM. My regular work environment is IDEA Ultimate, a Java IDE which uses a good chunk of memory and taxes the CPU quite heavily when indexing source files and Vagrant, so at least one and often multiple Linux VMs, with anywhere from 1 to 2 GB of memory dedicated to each.

Even with that, the OS doesn't really freeze.

stanfieldecho
I use on average maybe 8 chrome tabs at a given time and I use: Visual Studio Code, Spotify, Slack, Insomnia, and Skype. I also have Docker turned on all day.
stephenr
Slack in particular is a pig with resources, and it's exacerbated if you're in multiple teams apparently.

Try having Activity Monitor running with the memory tab active and keep an eye on what's using the most, and also the overview at the bottom.