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pshufd

macrumors G4
Original poster
Oct 24, 2013
10,263
14,622
New Hampshire
I have the problem with iCloud Notes via web browser using 12-13 GB of RAM when using Chromium-based browsers. I've found that performance using Firefox is generally awful with visual artifacts. I saw an Apple Support article with a lot of people complaining about this starting Spring 2019. It appears that it remains a problem. My only current solution is to run Notes on macOS or iOS but that's sometimes annoying as one of my main desktops runs Windows.
 
That's odd - I use iCloud Notes in Edge Chromium on Windows 10 - its memory footprint is minimal <200Mb RAM
 
That's odd - I use iCloud Notes in Edge Chromium on Windows 10 - its memory footprint is minimal <200Mb RAM

I tried that out (Edge, Opera, Opera Gaming, Chrome) and they all had the VM issue. At the moment, I'm running Notes in a MacBook Pro and I'm VNC'd into it from Windows. It's only Notes. I run Reminders and Calendar in Edge and VM usage is typically under 400 MB. There are also different versions of notes depending on macOS/iOS updates and which release you agree to. I guess that there are various compatibility modes based on Notes features.
 
I may have solved this problem. I copied some very large notes off to Growly Notes (my archival Notes program) and also deleted a bunch of notes with a ton of tables in them and RAM usage running iCloud Notes in Microsoft Edge has stayed under 1 GB for a day. I will continue to archive other notes as I've accumulated a lot of stuff over the past five years. It would be nice not to have to do this but it's unrealistic to not clean things up after a while.
 
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