How light are the cats?

Each app is measured on its own, freshly started with an empty profile and one window open, after it has settled (90 seconds) and then over one quiet minute. Numbers are for v0.1.0 on a MacBook Pro with an Apple M4 and 24 GB of memory, macOS 26.5. We measure again with every release.

• Memory is the app’s own processes added up (the main process and its helpers — four for each app), as macOS counts them in Activity Monitor’s Memory column (the physical footprint).
• CPU when idle is the average over that quiet minute: a sleeping cat.
• Download is the DMG; Installed is the app in /Applications.

What DevCatz runs for you — your sites, PHP, Node.js, databases — is not in its number: those are your own processes, and they cost the same whichever tool starts them. DevCatz itself stays quiet while they run.

Why Electron?

All four apps are built with Electron, which puts a web engine inside each app. It costs memory and download size — that is most of the numbers above — and it buys:

• One look, one behaviour in every app of the family, and on Windows next to macOS from the same code.
• The editors and viewers you see — the query editor, the JSON tree, the request builder — built once and shared.
• Speed of change: a small team can ship fixes and features quickly, for every app at once.

What we do about the cost: apart from what you ask them to run (DevCatz’s sites and services), the apps do no work in the background — they check for updates now and then and otherwise stay asleep — and every release is measured here before it ships. If a number goes up, it has to have a reason.

Measure it yourself

Open Activity Monitor, search for the app’s name, and add up the Memory column of its processes (the app and its Helper processes). For CPU, watch the same rows for a minute while the app sits there.

Last updated 2026-10-25