More shameless remarks by Larko

TweetDeck eats a lot of memory

I have been test using TweetDeck for some time now. It is a fantastic application with all those features  that I am not spending time to describe in this post. Instead, I refer to Paul Boutin’s excellent summary in NYT.

This post is about TweetDeck’s nasty habbit to consume a lot of memory. Paul writes that the extended use of memory should not be a problem unless you try to “multitask among apps”. And there is my problem: that is exactly what I do.

My usage of Twitter, Facebook, blogs etc is very much based on sharing. While I can be connected to Twitter and Facebook, post photos and videos and so on without using a web browser, I still need to surf the web and read my feeds to have something to share in the first place. So while TweetDeck is an exellent way to access social networks, I still need to run multiple browser tabs simultaneously with TweetDeck.

Now, my laptop with 2 GB memory can handle my multitasking most of the time. It is just that its keyboard died unexpectedly and I have so far not managed to replace it. And it is kind of hard to write with a computer with a crippled keyboard.

As a temporary emergency effort, I started to use my old desktop for my writing. It is a bit annoying but you can only ask so much to be performed by a three year old computer with just 256 Mb of memory. It has other functions, though, that still makes it sensible to use at all. I like to have Skype meetings using the desktop which I then re-stream live on Ustream using the laptop for that purpose. In the process I also get a record of the meeting, which I am able to share.

The desktop is also handy for receiving video and audio streams. It can handle all of this but not much more. Running TweetDeck is definitely out of its league.

The last statement got confirmed a few moments ago when I was running TweetDeck simultaneously with for Firefox tabs. Something my laptop would clear in flying colors but it was an agony for the poor old desktop. It took about 15 minutes to post one single link to Twitter and after that I had no option than to reboot the computer.

So while I intend to fix the keyboard problem right after Easter holidays, could the good people of TweetDeck please do something with this excessive memory consumption? ASAP, please!