Officially uninstalled Spark

So after holding out hope for a while, I’ve finally ended my years-long relationship with Spark. I uninstalled it today.

I’ve used it for years and really didn’t want to give it up, but it had just become way too slow and draggy. I’d switch from one inbox to another and sometimes sit there waiting far too long for it to respond.

The thing that finally pushed me over the edge was looking at Activity Monitor while trying to figure out why my MacBook Pro was running hot, feeling sluggish, and draining battery faster than I expected.

Spark was consistently one of the worst offenders. It had the highest 12-hour energy usage on my system, around 58–65, and at one point I caught a Spark Desktop Helper process at an Energy Impact of 434.

It was also using a surprising amount of memory. Between the main app and several Spark helper/renderer processes, I was seeing well over 1 GB of RAM being used by an email client.

I was also getting some pretty crazy kernel_task spikes when the computer slowed down — over 200% CPU at one point. I’m not saying Spark was definitely causing that, because Chrome and other things were also in the mix, but Spark was clearly using enough energy and resources that it became one of my prime suspects for the heat, battery drain, and general sluggishness.

After quitting Spark, things calmed down noticeably. So that was it for me.

Posting this in case anyone else is having similar issues. If Spark feels slow or your Mac is running hotter than it should, open Activity Monitor / Energy, check 12 hr Power, and expand Spark to see what the helper processes are doing.

Bit of a shame because I actually liked Spark. But an email client really shouldn’t be one of the heaviest things running on the machine. My subscription was actually renewed recently, so if I start hearing good stuff from others, I may reconsider it, but for now it's Apple Mail and Outlook for the time being.