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Alright, to be honest, I have no idea if this situation is specific to my computer or to any Linux user... but hear me out.

I have coded in GitHub's Atom text editor on Windows 8.1 platform before. Loved it, so when I switched to Linux (Ubuntu 15.10 Wily), the first thing I did was to download Atom's Linux build and install it on my system. It started out really great. It was as fast as I thought, even faster than its Windows counterpart, so I was fairly pleased.

However throughout the days I have reinstalled Linux and reinstalled Atom - and it was just very, very slow. I was editing a Markdown file and it lagged for 2 seconds to position the cursor onto where I clicked. I thought it may have been one package that was the culprit in eating up CPU/memory, so I deleted all the packages and started on a clean slate.

Nothing changed, for some reason.

Then I decided to check the System Monitor since there must be something going on, because ever since I've reinstalled Ubuntu 15.10 (I played around with some configuration files before and screwed the system up...) and reinstalled Atom - every time I started up Atom, my CPU would get very hot and the fan just gets super loud. Evidently that is not a good sign.

Behold, the culprit:

“atom --type=renderer --js-flags=--harmony --no-sandbox --lang=en-US --node-integration=true --enable-delegated-renderer --num-raster-threads=4 --gpu-rasterization-msaa-sample-count=8 --content-image-texture-target=3553 --video-image-texture-target=3553 --disable-accelerated-video-decode --disable-webrtc-hw-encoding --disable-gpu-compositing --channel=14354.0.624276243 --v8-natives-passed-by-fd --v8-snapshot-passed-by-fd”

Yes, the process name is that long, but here's a more readable list of the parameters:

--type=renderer
--js-flags=--harmony
--no-sandbox
--lang=en-US
--node-integration=true
--enable-delegated-renderer
--num-raster-threads=4
--gpu-rasterization-msaa-sample-count=8
--content-image-texture-target=3553
--video-image-texture-target=3553
--disable-accelerated-video-decode
--disable-webrtc-hw-encoding
--disable-gpu-compositing
--channel=14354.0.624276243
--v8-natives-passed-by-fd
--v8-snapshot-passed-by-fd

Here's an image of detailed description/statistics of the process - why is this renderer alone taking so much virtual memory...?

Seeing that the Atom creators also developed the Electron platform, I thought that Atom was built with Electron. Otherwise I can't explain as to why the Javascript V8 Engine is running as a renderer when I fire up Atom - whatever that means.

I'm really curious as to why this is happening, but most importantly I love Atom too much to give it up so easily, so I'm willing to put up a fight and see if you guys know what's going on.

In case it matters, I'm running Ubuntu 15.10 with GNOME Shell 3.16.4 desktop environment. Also, apm --version spits out:

apm       1.5.0
npm       2.13.3
node      0.10.40
python    2.7.10
git       2.5.0

P.S. Seeing that it's my first question, I may be violating some standards and netiquette on SE/SO, either through the way I voiced my question or any reason really - I don't know. If that is the case, please forgive me as I still have a lot to learn about StackOverflow and this amazing community which helped me through my journey of coding. Thank you wonderful folks in advance.

Eddo Hintoso
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  • I've always had this kind of problems on freshly installed ubuntus (not with atom but with every program I used), it was usually a problem of graphic drivers. – BlackBear Jan 24 '16 at 14:58
  • That is odd because the problem never presented itself before I re-installed Ubuntu -- while the start-up speed in Atom is notoriously slow, once you get it fired up it should be blazing fast. That was the case before - now something has gone really wrong, either because I installed many apps (Linux) or packages (Atom). I am currently using the **X.org X server -- Nouveau display driver from xserver-xorg-video-nouveau (open source)** – Eddo Hintoso Jan 25 '16 at 02:21
  • I recently gave Atom another try (first time since post 1.0) and it is brutally slow! At first I thought it may have been from the webupd8 repository but this same thing happens when installing from the official .deb hopefully this helps lead someone in the right direction – Frozenfire Feb 22 '16 at 14:43
  • Do you have a laptop with two video cards (ie intel and nvidia) and secondly do you have a monitor with a large resolution? – Frozenfire Feb 22 '16 at 15:36
  • Pressend enter too soon... I had a 2560x1440 external monitor and a 1080p laptop screen. When moved the the laptop screen I get much better performance but still not good enough. I dug into it more and if I switched to my nvidia card with prime-select I get acceptable performance on both screens. Good luck! – Frozenfire Feb 22 '16 at 15:42
  • @Frozenfire - at the time, I had both a 1080p external monitor and a 1080p laptop screen. I tested it with and without the monitors and Atom was just rendering like crazy, to the point where the cursor won't even blink. At that point I just gave up and reluctantly worked with Sublime Text 3, and a few weeks later I made my commitment to change to Vim. Which was probably one of the best decisions I had to make as an aspiring programmer. I highly suggest trying **Vim** out! You won't regret it. :D Anyways, `sudo prime-select nvidia` didn't work, but thanks for the help! – Eddo Hintoso Feb 23 '16 at 10:09

1 Answers1

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There is an Atom text editor snap package in Ubuntu 16.04 and later, and it runs the way it's supposed to, including the built-in JavaScript console in Dev Tools.

Run these commands to quickly and easily install and upgrade the Atom text editor snap package from the terminal in Ubuntu 16.04 and later (64-bit only).

  • Install Atom text editor:

    sudo snap install --classic atom

    Note that a snap in classic confinement behaves as a traditionally packaged application with full access to the system, and Atom extension packages are installed into the user's home directory.

  • Upgrade Atom text editor:

    sudo snap refresh --classic atom
karel
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