excessively large RAM usage by positron

[JosiahParry]

Positron uses 2.6gb of RAM being open. There is 1.55gb of RAM being allocated to the helper viewer which isn't open or being used.

This is a lot of memory usage! For context, Zed uses only 235mb of RAM being open (though its LSPs are another matter).

Can this be reduced?

[jmcphers]

The "helper" here means an auxiliary process, not literally the help viewer. This (Renderer) process is Chromium's GUI rendering thread and while we wish it were smaller I think you'll find it is consistent with other Electron apps, all of which also have a (Renderer) task you can view in Activity Monitor. For example on my machine I have:

• Positron render thread: 400mb
• VS Code render thread: 433mb
• Slack render thread: 600mb

The size of the render thread is roughly correlated to the amount of UI/script/DOM/webviews you have loaded into the app window.

Zed, of course, has a high performance Rust GUI rendering library which frees them from needing to use Chromium/Electron at all.