CODEWITHSUNDEEP
node.jselectron
Kamran Eyyubov
Kamran Eyyubov

Reputation: 300

Electron running multiple main processes vs multiple browser windows

I'm running electron on linux server for web scraping. And currently I'm running new electron command for each task. But it results in high cpu usage. Now thinking about running single electron instance, and create new BrowserWindow for each task. It will take some time to adapt the code base for this style, so I wanted to ask here first. Will it make a difference in cpu usage, and how much?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 3592

Answers (2)

Tim
Tim

Reputation: 8186

Running multiple instances of the main nodejs process with the default configuration is not actually supported or tested. You'll find that any features that persists data to disk either don't work, or don't work as expected (ie. localstorage, indexeddb, sessions, etc).

https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/2493

You can work around this by changing the data directory for each instance so they don't trample over each other but this is likely to use a lot of disk space and you'd need a way to keep track of all these data directories.

A single main process with multiple renderers is nearly always the answer.

Upvotes: 0

Alexander Leithner
Alexander Leithner

Reputation: 3442

Basically, creating a new NodeJS process will result in re-parsing your application's code, which will highly affect your CPU usage. Creating only a new BrowserWindow will only create a new renderer process, which is way more efficient.

If your application is packaged, e.g. with electron-packager, then creating a new instance will also affect your CPU usage like creating another NodeJS process, because that packaged (aka compiled) application has a copy of NodeJS in it, which is enough to run your code, but still affects the CPU usage.

But the decision depends on how you use the server. If you only run the Electron application to carry out the tasks that have been defined by you, adapting your working code would have no to only a low benefit. If you want to release this application and/or that server is used by some other tasks, e.g. a web server, it would be a real benefit if you adapt your code.

Upvotes: 2

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