If Discord is using too much RAM on your machine, the Rust rewrite does nothing for you today. Discord's CTO confirmed on November 4 that the Electron desktop app is being replaced with a native Rust client, and his post gives the schedule as "We hope to get it into testing with users soon™". The trademark sign is his.
The 290MB in the headlines comes from a cropped Task Manager screenshot attached to that post. I think the rewrite is the right call. I also think it's an admission that Discord could live with the memory problem for years, and you're still running that app. Further down are commands to measure your own client and the settings worth changing, plus why I'd skip Ripcord.
What Discord has confirmed about dropping Electron
The primary source is Stanislav Vishnevskiy's post on X. Discord has used Rust since 2018 in its infrastructure, voice tech and parts of the current client, he says, and "the holy grail was getting the whole client there." His summary of the consequence: "That means Electron goes away, and so does React Native." Mobile keeps its native UI and shares app code with desktop through Rust.
The UI framework is confirmed too: "And it's not Tauri, it's GPUI, so good guess everyone." An HN commenter who says they work on this at Discord adds that it's "based on Zed's gpui but we have applied a lot of patches so it's basically a private fork at this point."
There is no release date, and Hardware Busters reports no formal Discord announcement beyond those posts. Asked about performance, the CTO said "We expect it to be better," which is a long way from the headlines.
The Verge's story is what the HN thread links to, but it's paywalled and nothing here relies on it. An HN commenter who read it says it adds little beyond the 290MB line.
Where 290MB comes from, and every other Discord RAM number
The screenshot is worth opening, because the coverage I read barely describes it. It's the Apps list from Task Manager's Processes tab with the column headers cropped off. "Discord Phoenix" sits at 290.2 MB and 0.1% CPU, below Battle.net at 344.0 MB and above Google Chrome (19) at 1,568.6 MB. Notion (9) shows 932.5 MB, Steam Client WebHelper (7) 856.0 MB, Spotify (8) 652.7 MB, and World of Warcraft 1,184.8 MB. His post ends with him going back to the WoW Forever login screen.
You can't treat what looks like someone's gaming PC at a quiet moment as a benchmark. Two details do favor Discord. Inven Global reports that he later replied the client in the image was running two accounts at once, which the new app supports. And Phoenix has no process count beside its name, while the multi-process apps all do, which suggests a single process. I found nothing on how many servers were loaded, whether a channel was open or how long the app had been running.
| Figure | Source | What it describes |
|---|---|---|
| 290.2MB | Screenshot in the CTO's post, reported by Windows Latest | Early "Discord Phoenix" build, two accounts per the CTO, servers and channels not stated |
| Under 1GB | Discord employee on Reddit, December 2025 | "Normal usage" of the current client |
| 1326 MB | Venn1 on HN | Current Linux client, cold start, 11 servers |
| 1-2GB | Windows Latest's author | Their current Windows 11 client at idle |
| 4GB | Discord | Threshold for its auto-restart test |
Windows Latest hasn't tested the client, and as markbao put it on HN, "nobody outside Discord has actually used the Rust port." Hardware Busters points out the build likely has fewer features connected.
markbao's reply was aimed at the wildest number in the thread. Kuyawa wrote that "the app size also went from 10 GB to 10 MB", with no source. That's a disk number anyway, and when jttnr checked Flatpak they found 568 MB installed. chii suggested a 10 GB install could come from old versions and update files piling up.
HN is split on whether 290MB is good even if it holds. "300mb still is a lot," wrote one commenter. odo1242 countered that Discord caches images, subscribes to many chats, joins calls and renders Markdown. The reply to that was that Kopete did it in under 100MB 15 to 20 years ago.
If it holds at 290MB after a full day with 50 servers and a screen share, I'll be impressed. Until someone outside Discord can run it, the screenshot is marketing.
Five percent and a restart: why the Rust rewrite is an admission
The "since 2018" part is what stuck with me. Discord has had Rust in production for eight years while the desktop client stayed on Electron. Shipping one web codebase across desktop and browser was a trade, and your RAM paid for it.
As recently as last December the fix was a restart. Discord tested restarting its own Windows app when memory passed 4GB, after at least 60 minutes of runtime, 30 minutes of user inactivity and no active call, at most once a day. Alongside that it reported "a 5% reduction in p95 memory so far, with more work to be done."
Eleven months after that came news of a full client rewrite. I read that as Discord concluding the incremental path wasn't going to get there.
The rewrite has a cost too. The objection I'd take most seriously from the thread is accessibility. ethin wrote that gaps there would mean "I literally cannot use your application," and commenters argue over how far along GPUI's support is. The CTO says the app "looks and works identically" to today's, and screen reader users will test that claim hardest.
How to reduce Discord RAM usage right now
I couldn't find clean before-and-after numbers for these, and the guide I took the settings from only promises a "noticeable decrease". So measure first.
On Windows, in PowerShell:
(Get-Process Discord | Measure-Object WorkingSet64 -Sum).Sum / 1MB
On Linux:
ps -C Discord -o rss= | awk '{s+=$1} END {print s/1024 " MB"}'
Both add up every Discord process and count shared pages more than once, so they run high. They're fine for comparing your own before and after. To compare with the 290.2MB screenshot on Windows, read the Discord row in Task Manager's Processes tab, the same view Vishnevskiy posted. It should come in lower than the PowerShell sum.
Then work through this, roughly in order of effort:
- Restart it properly. Discord's own failsafe is a restart, which suggests memory builds up over long sessions. Quit from the tray, since closing the window can leave it running, or press Ctrl+R to reload.
- Stop animations. In Settings > Accessibility, set stickers to "Animate on interaction" and turn off "Automatically play GIFs when Discord is focused".
- Disable the overlay in Settings > Game Overlay if you don't use it.
- Leave, or at least hide, servers you never read. PCWorld notes memory grows as more servers and features load.
- Try toggling Hardware Acceleration in Settings > Advanced, then measure both states. The guide above recommends turning it off, but it also warns that this raises CPU usage and can lower video and screen-share quality.
Menu names move between releases, so search within Settings if a path has changed.
Does running Discord in a browser use less RAM?
Maybe, and it's the one structural change you can make today. A PWA or tab doesn't bundle a separate browser the way Electron does, and it gets the browser's sandbox as a bonus. Open discord.com/app and check the cost in Chrome's task manager (Shift+Esc) or Firefox's about:processes.
I couldn't find a controlled desktop-versus-browser measurement worth quoting, so treat this as an experiment. Discord in a lean browser should do well, though I wouldn't count on it as tab 87 in an already bloated profile.
The catch is voice. Discord's docs say system-wide push-to-talk requires the desktop app, and custom keybinds are desktop only. One Linux user on HN ended up back on the desktop client for voice calls for exactly this reason. If you game with push-to-talk, this is out. If you mostly read channels, try it. An HN commenter says the CTO has posted that Discord stays usable in the browser, though tbreak notes Discord hasn't said whether the browser version changes.
Why I'd skip Ripcord and other third-party Discord clients
Third-party clients keep coming up as the RAM fix. Discord's terms don't name them, but they prohibit "using any unauthorized software designed to modify the services", and hmry's summary on HN is the one to plan around: "Discord says using modified or alternative clients is against their terms of service." hmry also says people have been banned for it when they did something detectable.
Ripcord adds its own problem. Its download page lists 0.4.29, updated 2021-06-04, and a commenter in the thread called it abandoned and asked whether it even works anymore. That's risking your account on abandoned software to save some RAM. Client mods like Vencord or BetterDiscord are no help here either, since on desktop they still run inside Electron, and the terms' ban on modifying Discord's software is the clearest language in the document. The browser tab carries none of that risk, so try it first.
So how bad is yours?
Run the command above and post the number along with your OS and server count. I want to know how far real installs sit from Discord's "normal usage is <1GB".
And pick a side: is 290MB for a chat app a triumph, or still an embarrassment?
Top comments (0)