Electron Apps Causing System-Wide Lag on Tahoe
19 hours ago
- #Software Bugs
- #Electron
- #macOS Performance
- Electron-based apps like Discord and VS Code cause system-wide lag on macOS Tahoe, even with low CPU/GPU usage.
- The root cause is Electron overriding a private AppKit API (_cornerMask), which disrupts WindowServer's shadow calculation, leading to performance issues.
- Minimizing Electron apps or disabling window shadows via 'launchctl setenv CHROME_HEADLESS 1' temporarily fixes the lag.
- Affected apps include Slack, Signal, VS Code, and others, with many still running outdated Electron versions.
- The issue also impacts non-Electron apps like MS Edge (Chromium-based) and causes secondary problems like garbled audio under memory pressure.
- Criticism targets Electron's engineering and Apple's lack of backward compatibility or warnings for private API changes.
- A script is available to detect apps with outdated Electron versions, but most users lack fixed versions.