Innovative Electron Application Achieves Low RAM Usage with SvelteKit and GraphQL Integration

In the quest for efficient desktop applications, I recently developed an Electron-based app that stands out by consuming minimal system resources—particularly RAM—without sacrificing performance or aesthetic appeal.

Rethinking Electron App Performance

Many Electron applications, such as popular chat clients, tend to be sluggish and memory-intensive, often due to excessive repaints and inefficient rendering strategies within Chromium. To counter this, I focused on reducing unnecessary repaints by limiting updates to the CSS properties that matter—primarily transform and opacity—for smooth animations. Additionally, enabling background throttling ensures that the app remains responsive even when not in focus, freeing up valuable resources.

This approach allows for advanced visual effects, like 3D animations and glowing imagery or videos, which are surprisingly inexpensive in terms of computational cost. These enhancements not only improve the user experience but also maintain low resource consumption.

Choosing the Right Framework

For the frontend, I opted for SvelteKit, a framework renowned for its lightweight and reactive nature. Unlike some Electron apps that rely heavily on React and can balloon up to 800MB of RAM—such as Discord—I aimed for a leaner footprint. This decision significantly reduces memory usage and improves overall responsiveness.

Robust and Secure Technology Stack

The app is built on a solid foundation of TypeScript paired with an exceptionally strict ESLint configuration, ensuring code quality and maintainability. For data management, I integrated GraphQL through urql and gql.tada, facilitating offline caching and entity normalization. This setup allows users to operate the app seamlessly even without an internet connection.

On the UI front, I utilized shadcn/svelte components, combining aesthetic appeal with functional simplicity.

Efficient Multi-Process Architecture

A critical aspect of the application’s efficiency hinges on performing intensive tasks within Electron’s utilityProcess. This process acts as a specialized worker, akin to a Node.js environment, which offloads heavy lifting from the main process. Communication between processes is handled via sophisticated IPC mechanisms, ensuring smooth data exchange without bogging down the primary thread.

Additional Technical Innovations

The application boasts several advanced features, especially within its custom video player component. These include a specialized subtitle library, OpenGL shader-based video artifact removal for cleaner playback, and other innovative functionalities that enhance media presentation.

Conclusion

This project demonstrates that optimizing Electron applications isn’t inherently complex. With careful attention to rendering techniques,