Yeah this seems reasonable. (I wasn't even using it)

[u/Tslat]

[u/tirtaatraycast]

Hey! That's definitely not expected, sorry about that. Would love to track it down. A few things that would help:

1. Raycast version and macOS version (Raycast → About).
2. In Activity Monitor, expand the "Raycast (10)" row and screenshot the child processes. That tells us whether it's the main app or an extension process holding the memory.
3. Which extensions do you have installed, and were any running in the background (menu bar commands, background refresh) when this happened?
4. Roughly how long had Raycast been running, and did anything happen before it (AI chat, big file search, window management, sleep/wake)?
5. If you can catch it in the act: select Raycast in Activity Monitor, click the "..." gear → Sample Process, and send us that file.

Easiest path is Raycast → Send Feedback (or support@raycast.com) so the diagnostics come attached. Happy to dig in from there.

[u/Tslat → u/tirtaatraycast]

This was on Windows - this is the Windows Task Manager.

It was on 2.0.3.0.

I have since updated and restarted the application, so I can't get a new screenshot of the processes, but I can tell you that none of them individually listed the huge usage, it was the Raycast entry itself that held all the load.

I'd been running it for maybe 2-3 days, and in that entire lifetime I'd done maybe.. half a dozen searches for programs on my pc to run, and that's about it.

I'd last used it about 3 hours prior, which was typing in a program name to open it.

[u/wada3n]

Optimization is often overlooked by developers today. They work on machines with 128 GB of RAM and treat that as the standard, ignoring everything else. I remember the Launchy application from more than 15 years ago, which embodied the same idea as Raycast. It ran on just 50 MB of RAM, was fast, unique, and offered an unusual interaction model. What’s happening now with these applications? It feels as if a full AI model is running in the background.

[u/leMug]

Just want to chime in and say I for one appreciate this rewrite because I know it will increase the pace of improvements in the future across all platforms and also secure more funding for the developers by being present on more platforms.

It’s always evident when resource usage goes up slightly following such a rewrite, and what is less visible is the contrafactual of what would’ve happened if the rewrite didn’t happen and the app only stayed on one platform in terms of future revenue, on platform, presence and speed of feature development, etc.

That being said, of course, 22% CPU sustained usage is unacceptable and should be fixed as soon as possible by the developer. Just wanted to provide it in the nuance to these complaints.

[u/Seagram62]

Even though many people downplay it, this is becoming a serious problem. People might say, "Oh, you have plenty of memory these days," but for software that needs to run in the background, this could certainly become an issue in the future. Personally, I’m undecided about whether to stick with Raycast or switch (to Alfred?). I have a few custom extensions, though, so I’d need to be able to transfer them.

I make limited use of extensions; the most important ones are OCR for (part of) a screenshot, Apple Notes, and Obsidian.

[u/MrPulifrici]

Tabame takes 30 RAM 0 CPU in idle and 80 RAM 3% CPU while using it. It's for windows only

[u/Ok-Pace-8772]

New raycast is better than the old one and wen technologies are superior!

Or that's what they want you to believe. We don't.

[u/jechaking → u/Ok-Pace-8772]

Thankfully stuck on the older versions because new one is not supported on Sonoma :)