How many processes?

Jerud

@Jay, quick question:
Legend is spawning 8 processes in Windows Task Manager. Does that sound right to you? I was pretty sure it used to only create one.

About an hour ago, Legend started to bog down real bad. No idea why; I didn’t change or update anything. I noticed the 8 processes – plus several other “loose” Legend processes that weren’t getting grouped in with the other 8. I tried rebooting, safe mode, network off – finally solved it by simply logging out of Legend (was really not expecting that to help, but it did).

Legend is back to its usual responsiveness, but I still have that group of 8 processes in Task Manager (although the “loose” ones are gone). Am I back to normal, or do I still have an issue?

Jay

Jerud That’s just because Legend is an Electron app. It’s basically running Chrome inside of it to render the web app, which integrates in with our app-specific code for app features. Because of that it does what Chrome does, which is to create a ton of renderer processes. You should see similar behavior in the Task manager for other Chrome-based browsers or other Electron apps like Slack.

In what way was it bogging down? Was the app itself slow or was it using a lot of CPU and slowing down your whole computer? That would be unrelated to the number of processes but is concerning!

Jerud

It was just Legend. Type a couple sentences, wait 10 seconds, then suddenly all the text appears at once. My computer was behaving just like it does when Chrome misbehaves and spawns oodles of processes….one reason I don’t run Chrome anymore – such a pig! Aside from the fans going nuts my other apps and windows itself remained stable.

I had been fussing with my firewall a lot today, blocking and unblocking processes to recover from a settings snafu in that app. All while tethered on a less-than-stellar connection. Legend wasn’t directly part of that but maybe got swept up in the mess. Thanks for clarifying how things work and what’s normal for Legend in the Task Manager.

Jay

Interesting! It may have been that something in the firewall blocked Firebase (the database backend we use) and it was struggling to get reconnected? In that case just restarting the app or even Reload from the View menu would fix it.

By the way re: Chrome. Electron actually uses Chromium, the lower level basis of Chrome. So it’s not quite as bloated as Chrome itself. These days a lot browsers use Chromium too, including Brave, Opera, and even Edge.

Jerud

BTW this hasn’t recurred so apparently it was just crossed wires due to changing firewall settings with connections open. Reboot/relaunch solved the lag and slowness.