Trying out different front-ends for #Mastodon… as I'm finding the stock web client, whilst it does everything I want in a UI I'm happy to use, has a shockingly bad memory leak. If I leave it on the home feed for a day or so, by the end of the day the UI tab is consuming >5GB RAM and pushing everything out into swap.
That's bad on my laptop which has 8GB… it's even worse on the tablet with 4GB.
I gave #Elk a try on their hosted instance, looks promising, but when I try to build it on #NodeJS v22 to host it here, the post-install scripts try to feed the NodeJS binary a raw #TypeScript program, and of course it barfs not knowing how to interpret that. Had a look at the `Dockerfile` for it and the base container, no clues there… so that rules out Elk.
I'm giving #Phanpy a try now. Building it wasn't difficult, however I had to dig a bit down further in the `README.md` to realise I needed to set some environment variables before calling `npm run build` (notably `PHANPY_WEBSITE="${ABSOLUTE_URL}"`, or else it won't run when you deploy it).
Not liking the fact that boosting or favouriting is a two-click process, but that is my principle gripe for now. Other than that, things seem to be reasonably responsive, so we'll see how this goes. If I can get away from needing to keep `top` open sorting by resident memory usage and periodically killing the worst offender (which more often than not, is the Mastodon tab)… that's a plus.
Stuart Longland (VK4MSL)
npub12n…d9dex
2025-10-10 01:29:27 UTC
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2025-10-10 01:29:27 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "Trying out different front-ends for #Mastodon… as I'm finding the stock web client, whilst it does everything I want in a UI I'm happy to use, has a shockingly bad memory leak. If I leave it on the home feed for a day or so, by the end of the day the UI tab is consuming \u003e5GB RAM and pushing everything out into swap.\n\nThat's bad on my laptop which has 8GB… it's even worse on the tablet with 4GB.\n\nI gave #Elk a try on their hosted instance, looks promising, but when I try to build it on #NodeJS v22 to host it here, the post-install scripts try to feed the NodeJS binary a raw #TypeScript program, and of course it barfs not knowing how to interpret that. Had a look at the `Dockerfile` for it and the base container, no clues there… so that rules out Elk.\n\nI'm giving #Phanpy a try now. Building it wasn't difficult, however I had to dig a bit down further in the `README.md` to realise I needed to set some environment variables before calling `npm run build` (notably `PHANPY_WEBSITE=\"${ABSOLUTE_URL}\"`, or else it won't run when you deploy it).\n\nNot liking the fact that boosting or favouriting is a two-click process, but that is my principle gripe for now. Other than that, things seem to be reasonably responsive, so we'll see how this goes. If I can get away from needing to keep `top` open sorting by resident memory usage and periodically killing the worst offender (which more often than not, is the Mastodon tab)… that's a plus.",
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