eliot-akira/singletron-example

Minimal example of sharing a single instance of Electron

Singletron example

Minimal example of sharing a single instance of Electron

Why?

A common complaint about Electron is that each app instance takes up significant (100MB~) memory. There is an on-going discussion in the Electron repo about how to share a runtime among apps. This is an attempt at addressing the issue.

Please note that it is just a proof-of-concept, and not meant for production use.

See it in action

git clone https://github.com/eliot-akira/singletron-example
cd singletron-example
npm install
npm start

This starts an instance of the app, and listens for inter-process requests from other apps.

Then, in another terminal window, start more instances.

npm start
npm start
npm start

They will connect with the first instance, and hand over the rest of the launch process by requesting new windows.

How does it work?

It uses node-ipc to communicate and negotiate between server/clients. The IPC hub is a separate module called singletron. For the initialization step, see the bottom of main.js.