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# Electron Plugin

A better Renderer management plugin designed for Electron

September 5, 2026CodeElectronNpm PackagesNodejsTypeScript

## Where the idea came from

The inspiration for this plugin actually came from a rather interesting place: one day I was checking the **memory usage of the Mac WeChat client** and noticed this:

I noticed that my WeChat had **three Renderers** running, so I tried restarting WeChat and saw this:

I found that **one of the Renderers was gone**. To figure out where that renderer came from, I tried opening Moments. The moment I opened Moments, it appeared. Then I closed Moments, and an hour later I found that Renderer **was still there, still holding on to more than 40 MB of my memory**! Unless you restarted the app, there was no way to get rid of it.

At first I thought this was only a WeChat problem, but then I opened QQ, opened many different Electron apps, and even wrote a minimal test app of my own — and it turned out **nearly every Electron app has this problem**!

As shown below:

Because most Electron apps today are built on top of mature web frameworks like **React Router or Vue Router**, the situation ends up like this: as long as a Renderer stays open, it never closes itself; and once enough of them pile up, Renderers keep stacking on top of each other.

Like this:

For underpowered machines, or machines busy with other important work, this situation can be fairly dangerous.

So I decided to write a plugin to take care of this!

## Writing the plugin

To be on the safe side while writing it, I checked Electron's documentation on this topic:

Clearly, in the official wording Electron is quite confident that **Renderers are definitely destroyed when they are not in use**.

But here is the thing: did Electron actually do that? The answer is: **no**. And this problem is not a new discovery — it has been around since **2019, seven years ago**.

The related issue on the Electron repo: [**electron/electron#20277**](https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/20277)

Then another five years went by — it is now **2026**, and the latest version of Electron still has this problem. What a makeshift operation!

While reading the docs, I also noticed a detail that deserves attention:

In Electron, **a single Renderer may be responsible for rendering several Pages at once**, so the plugin has to be careful about one thing: a Renderer should only be terminated using Chromium's task lifecycle (default: **15 minutes**) when it has **no pages left**. (This is for compatibility and to keep the plugin's footprint minimal, so it relies directly on Chromium's task lifecycle management.)

In the end this became the plugin, published on [**npmjs**](https://www.npmjs.com/package/smart-renderers).

Repository: [**CherryCuteCN/Smart-Renderers**](https://github.com/CherryCuteCN/Smart-Renderers)

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