Quick access not releasing memory after close?

tmakaro

Firstly, I must say that I am very impressed by the memory usage of 1P8 especially when the program is in the background. However, I was looking at task manager to get some data to convince my friend and I noticed some odd behavior.

When 1P8 is in the background, this is what task manager reads:

less than 60MB. Very close to what 1P7 used. Impressive!

When I open, the main 1P8 window to the foreground, memory jumps to about 135MB. Nothing unexpected here. Definitely, more than 1P7 used. But I get more features, and a better UI, so no worries.

Now, I close the main 1P8 window, and 1P8 goes back to being a background task with <60MB being used (and 3 processes in task manager like the image above). Awesome!

Now, let me open Quick Access (personally I use the keyboard shortcut but I don't think that matters). Here, 1P8 jumps to about 95MB of RAM. No worries. UI stuff is happening. Sort of expected.

Here's where things are weird. If I now close Quick Access. I still have an extra process running, and it's still consuming about 95MB of RAM total.

If I then reopen the main 1P8 window, and close it, then the RAM drops back down and I only have 3 processes consuming <60MB of RAM.

Ultimately, 35MB isn't a big deal all things considered, but it does look like closing Quick Access isn't releasing that memory (and I would like background tasks to leave as much memory as possible for my games 😊). This could be because 1P8 expects Quick Access to be used again shortly and doesn't want to get rid of it immediately, but it does stick around forever (well until the main 1P8 window is opened and closed).

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1Password Version: 8.5.0
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: Windows 10 21H2

PeterG_1P

Hi @tmakaro, thanks for this post! I have to say, I'm impressed with the level of specificity and systematization you've brought to this. It's really awesome! 😃

While I don't have much in the way of specifics to offer immediately, I will be sure to pass this on to our development team so they can take a look at how Quick Access handles the release of memory in situations like this. We do always enjoy a chance to make things more efficient for you wherever we can.

Thanks for your compliments about the app, and we'll hope to keep impressing you (and hopefully your friend) with the results as we go forward!

PeterG_1P

Hi @tmakaro, I'm back again sooner than expected. I checked in with our development team about this, and they confirmed that this is actually working as intended. To explain a bit 👇

Quick Access keeps itself ready to go at all times - unlike the other apps with their attendant UIs, which as you saw, drop any memory they're using right upon close.

This is a bit of a performance vs. resource-usage judgment: Quick Access is designed to be the thing that you call up when you just need a login that very second (perhaps while you're in the middle of some other workflow, too), so there's a good case to be made that it's worth it to reserve that relatively small amount of RAM in order to make Quick Access as instantly useful at all times as people would expect it to be.

With that said:

• Quick Access is designed not to use CPU when idle and invisible,
• and it does reset the process upon lock, as you'd expect.

And I should also say that while this specific behavior may not change, we're always looking to net any efficiencies we can in order to make the app perform nimbly and with a minimal impact on your system resources. I hope this post has provided some insight into the design thinking behind Quick Access - and thank you for bringing up the question!

tmakaro

That you for the response. Though that does bring up a couple questions. If the memory allocated to quick access is intended to not be cleared (for optimal performance when opening it), then why does it get cleared when I open and then close the main 1P8 window? Wouldn't that slow down the next time you want to open quick access?

And secondly, since quick access doesn't have an animation when it opens, it opens faster than literally every other program on my computer. Even including something as light as notepad. Regardless of whether Quick Access was opened previously or not, it opens insanely fast, and I don't notice the difference between having opened it previously or not in terms of launch speed. Perhaps for computers without SSD's this pre-loaded memory might make a difference, but it still seems to me like quick access should clear itself from memory after a few minutes of inactivity. Otherwise, it makes me feel the need to quickly open and close the main 1P8 window to release that bit of memory before doing something super intensive (even though it would strictly make a difference for more things).

tmakaro

Oh wait a second. Ignore my last comment. It looks like Quick Access isn't releasing the memory at all. It's just that the process was named differently (starting with an "m" for the first letter of the vault name). So it wasn't appearing with the others processes in alphabetical order. Only when I opened and closed quick access did the process name get changed (sometimes appearing blank and sometimes as "1Password". If blank, the name appears as "1Password" if I close and reopen task manager). Then I opened the main 1P8 window, the process was getting renamed again and moving down in task manager so I didn't see it.

So, everytime in my original post when I said it was about 60MB it wasn't because this process just moved in task manager, so it's about 95MB the whole time in the background. Definitely a little less impressed with the background memory usage now, but hey, Quick Access is undeniably better than Mini was in 1P7, so I guess I can't really complain.

Thank you again for taking a look at this with me.

PeterG_1P

Hi @tmakaro, anytime - and I appreciated the detailed discussion!

but hey, Quick Access is undeniably better than Mini was in 1P7

I agree - and while I understand too that some people really like mini, the neat thing about Quick Access is it's still pretty new - so as good as it is already, things are very likely to get considerably better from here. We'll be doing our best to impress you with future updates as we go!