Huge energy impact of Zed (native Mac app)

[bartaz]

After switching with Zed from Chrome app to native Mac app I've noticed that Zed started to show up in 'Apps Using Significant Energy' list (under battery status icon).

And when I look into Activity Monitor it clearly shows huge energy impact of Zed (even comparing to Chrome which was mostly my no 1 energy eater).

Expanding list of processes shows node-webkit processes.

I'm not sure if that's directly a Zed's issue, or maybe node-webkit consumes such a lot of energy. Maybe it's related to the fact that I work mostly with 3 panes open in quite file heavy project directory.

But even not looking at those 'energy consumption' numbers - the difference in my battery time when I'm using Zed is noticeably shorter.

[zefhemel]

I've noticed this too. It's also using a lot of CPU sometimes. I've tried to run the Chrome profiler on it, but it doesn't show anything useful. It's really strange, I have to continue looking into it.

[zefhemel]

By the way, are you running a downloaded standalone version or a version from github? If the latter, be sure to run "make app/ace" once in a while to fetch a new Ace version. I think I see different CPU behavior with recent versions. Not sure, though.

[bartaz]

Standalone (I've just noticed an update to 0.11.1).

[bartaz]

Again I get really high battery and CPU use by Zed native app on Mac. To the level that it basically slows down whole system and makes it barely usable.

I don't know if there is any way to say what particular action makes it so slow, in Activity Monitor I only see two node-webkit processes on top.

I don't know if size of the project may be the reason, but I made a quick count in my project directory - I have around 10000 files in the project (all sources, images, build, etc) summing up to around 600000 LOC.

[zefhemel]

This is kind of bad, but I switched back to the Chrome version for this reason ;) Have you tried working with the same project in the Chrome App version. Do you get the same problems there?

[bartaz]

Yes, it seems that performance is better with Chrome app (problems hide nicely in dozens of Chrome's processes) ;)

But I just remember why I was so glad to switch to native app: #392

[spikeyfish2]

Is there an update on progress with this? Just started using Zed and I really like it, but this is a stopping factor really. Avg energy impact of Zed is 80, while Sublime Text maxes at 12.

[zefhemel]

Since this only happens with standalone I'm hoping the node-WebKit (now
nwjs) guys solve this. Their recent release broke a lot of stuff, so I have
to wait for them to fix them so I can update the nwjs version Zed uses.

On do 5 feb. 2015 at 22:44 Alex Blundell notifications@github.com wrote:

Is there an update on progress with this? Just started using Zed and I
really like it, but this is a stopping factor really. Avg energy impact of
Zed is 80, while Sublime Text maxes at 12.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#311 (comment).

[matejc]

I have similar problem on Linux.. and have a temporary/hackish solution...
I was able to make zed run with nwjs 0.12.2, without issues so far, but I had to do this: matejc@74dd7c8

window.chrome is an object, no matter if it is ran by webkit, therefore the check fails and tries to load background.chrome.js and fails at this https://github.com/zedapp/zed/blob/master/app/dep/architect.js#L505 line because of provided[name] being null and can not resolve provided[name].name.

Will use zed this way for a few days and report back here.

[matejc]

Huh, almost forgot about this issue, my conclusion: Zed standalone works with nwjs 0.12.2 and I haven't got any major performance impact since.