Evernote vs Evernote Legacy - resource usage.

[Tom_T 1]

With Evernote legacy running on my PC it takes a total of 139.5 MB, however with the latest Evernote is using 840.4 MB.

Why is the new version using so much more memory ?
I also often see the newer version spiking the CPU, where legacy doesn't.

Anyone any ideas.
PC is an AMD Ryzen 5 3600, 16GM Ram, 2x 4TB disk.

Thanks

[Jon/t 1,454]

It does use more memory and sometimes a fair bit more whilst its indexing and doing stuff in the background.

I've seen it as high as 1GB and right now its running at 442MB.

Its never impacted the PCs performance though and I have a beaten-up old Dell with 8GB of RAM.

[gazumped 11,829]

...and with Evernote Legacy sporting a brand new red 'outdated software' warning message,  now might be the time to start using v10 full-time.  If you only start the app occasionally it probably has a lot of admin work to catch up on,  hence the extra load.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,990]

One reason v. 10 uses more memory, I'd guess (no more than that) is that it runs inside the Electron framework, which is what allows it to work and look the same on all platforms.

[PinkElephant 8,390]

Just start Chrome without opening a single tab. What you will see is a browser using appr. 1GB of RAM, without doing anything.

The framework EN is using is build based on Chrome.

[Constantine001 27]

There are other note-taking apps based on Electron that consume less than 130MB RAM (Notesnook, for example). So the whole Electron thing is just an excuse - yes, Electron is based on a browser (Chromium in this case), but still, as I said, there are other apps doing the same and consuming way less RAM.

I have written to Evernote support at least twice about this issue. Chrome (latest version), with just one tab open, only consumes 380MB RAM on my Windows 11 laptop. Notion Desktop (again, Electron-based, and very resource-hungry since it's a whole wiki library) consumes around 365MB. At the point of writing, Evernote desktop is the only app installed on my laptop that consumes 800MB even when idle and minimized to the system tray...

Now, people will say "buy more RAM... This is what RAM is for... Unused RAM is a waste". But these arguments really miss the point. It's about having a resource-optimized app that can use the least amount of RAM needed in order to run. The developer team @Federico Simionato should really try to see if there are any memory leaks or code optimization that can be performed. Or see what other Electron apps are doing differently. Something is seriously wrong here.

[PinkElephant 8,390]

Then it’s wrong by design and since 3 years now. It has been using RAM in the current ballpark since it was launched 3 years ago. It was a lot slower back then, and went through some optimization cycles.

Speed is up, RAM stays the same. Since it is spread over several „helpers“, I assume they load parts of what’s needed into the RAM, to speed things up.

Personally I had no issues with it, even not on a 10 year old i7 with Win10, that I skipped when switching to the Mac.

[Constantine001 27]

7 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

Then it’s wrong by design and since 3 years now. It has been using RAM in the current ballpark since it was launched 3 years ago. It was a lot slower back then, and went through some optimization cycles.

Speed is up, RAM stays the same. Since it is spread over several „helpers“, I assume they load parts of what’s needed into the RAM, to speed things up.

Personally I had no issues with it, even not on a 10 year old i7 with Win10, that I skipped when switching to the Mac.

Yes, this precisely: it's wrong by design for 3 years now, since the Electron app was introduced. Bending Spoons have made it somewhat faster but the RAM usage issue persists. I hope they will do something about it. I'm using Craft, Notesnook, UpNote, Notion, OneNote at the same time (yes, I'm a bit of an app nerd!) and Evernote is the only app that consumes 800MB even when idle. The most RAM-intensive of these is Notion (at least on my laptop) at around 365 MB as I said above. So 800MB is more than double.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,990]

11 hours ago, Constantine001 said:

Now, people will say "buy more RAM... This is what RAM is for... Unused RAM is a waste". But these arguments really miss the point. It's about having a resource-optimized app that can use the least amount of RAM needed in order to run.

I'm with "people." It just isn't 1989 anymore. IAC, on my Windows 10 laptop Evernote uses less than 500 MB of RAM. I have less than zero idea why it's so high on yours, but it may not be typical. If Evernote slows down your system, makes other apps run slow, or something like that, then it's a practical issue. To me, it seems that the problem is more or less theoretical.

[Constantine001 27]

7 hours ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

I'm with "people." It just isn't 1989 anymore. IAC, on my Windows 10 laptop Evernote uses less than 500 MB of RAM. I have less than zero idea why it's so high on yours, but it may not be typical. If Evernote slows down your system, makes other apps run slow, or something like that, then it's a practical issue. To me, it seems that the problem is more or less theoretical.

I don't disagree. Definitely theoretical and not practical since I have more than enough RAM on both my laptops. But a problem is a problem no matter whether theoretical or practical. Especially now that Evernote is a high-end priced app, I expect it to have a clever, optimized, resource-friendly design and output. Maybe it's a matter of perception but even the "less than 500MB of RAM" that it uses on your Windows 10 laptop seems excessive to me, especially when compared to Obsidian, Notion, UpNote, NotesNook, Craft, OneNote - some of which I am running at the time of speaking.

And speaking of different apps, let me compare this to another Electron app: Obsidian. Obsidian Sync costs $10/month (so slightly cheaper than Evernote Personal) and I wouldn't have paid for it, but it offers everything Evernote offers (more or less), plus PDF OCR support via plugins (which is the main reason I use Evernote for), and consumes 16MB when minimized (!!!) or 120MB when the window is open and active. I just wanted to show how another high-end priced app (I find paying $10 just for sync expensive) that offers more features (the graph view only should consume tons of RAM and CPU - only it doesn't) is optimized and can use less than 100MB RAM even! 

Anyway, this is not a rant - I just hope the developers will do something about it. As I said, I've emailed them twice already, maybe three times, can't even remember. Let's wait and see. Something tells me that they will probably optimize the engine at some point, they will have to anyway otherwise it will become a resource hog. So yes, a theoretical issue for me, and maybe it has to do more with my tendency of comparing different productivity apps.

[gazumped 11,829]

40 minutes ago, Constantine001 said:

But a problem is a problem

Agreed - but I'd bet that a more important question for Evernote in the next few years would be - is that a priority?  They're doing a pretty good job at the moment of making sure that the basics are working,  and I'm sure there are many areas where things could work better. 

As that nice Mr Jobs used to put it - "Done is better than perfect" so I'd expect the company to be doing a broad sweep across the product making sure everything is working,  and then later,  another sweep to see what can be improved.

[gandoron 3]

I would be thrilled with only 800MB of memory.  I sit at 2GB+ all the time.  My notes are text only, no images or other media.  My browsers are running full heavy webpages, yet they are using far less memory per page.  EN memory usage is just crazy high.  All I want is text, bullets and good search.

[PinkElephant 8,390]

It takes what it needs. I don't think this discussion is leading anywhere. In times of RAM being cheap, and swapping with an SSD happening in the background all the time on modern systems, I really don't see an issue here.

The app needs to load everything needed to run all features, even those that a specific user will maybe never apply. But the code is loaded, you can't load only part of it, and leave the rest "on demand".

Discussing this is only a waste of time.

[gandoron 3]

My largest note is 350K.  Now 2 months later is needs 2x as much memory.  I don't want my Ram paging to my harddisk.  For less than 100Mb of text notes EN needs almost 4.5Gb of memory.  This is more than a AAA video game with full textures or a browser with more than 50 tabs.  This is not reasonable.

 

[gazumped 11,829]

1 hour ago, gandoron said:

This is not reasonable.

You have 21 Evernote processes running.  I have 8.  Maybe a restart and a good deal more information about your system might help us help you?

[gandoron 3]

Happy to help troubleshoot this.  Given the Evernote is already running, how much additional memory should opening a 5KB note take?  Sitting at 5.6Gb right now.  After closing every note window, and only having the main application window open (8 processes, from one window), I still sit at 3.4Gb.

What system information do you want? 

System
OS Name    Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
Version    10.0.22621 Build 22621
Processor    AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-Core Processor, 3401 Mhz, 16 Core(s), 32 Logical Processor(s)
Installed Physical Memory (RAM)    32.0 GB

Evernote
10.63.4-win-ddl-public (20231006121931)
Editor: v176.13.0
Service: v1.75.5

[PinkElephant 8,390]

And ?

You run an app inside of a browser engine. It’s a different concept than a natively coded app.

We know since 3 years that this creates a different operational behavior. Come back if there is news to tell.