Is this normal?
Joplin does run Electron, which is a bunch of Chromium and node.js engine changes. It is bigger than a typical native application.
Please also keep in mind that each plugin also adds an additional process that uses quite a bit of memory.
I always thought Microsoft apps are huge and I'm surprised that OneNote uses so little memory--but maybe it shares some memory with Windows.
my is 15 parts 540 MB, so yes, yours doesn't appear abnormal.
I loved the plugins that are available for install. So I ended up getting about 30-35 plugins, and the number of Joplin processes shot up to over 40, each of which was taking anywhere between 150-250MB of memory, with the main process going up to 600MB - probably to manage all the plugins. Close to 2GB of memory for one app was not acceptable...unfortunately, I had to go in disable every single plugin. Now I am running a bare-bones Joplin. The only advantage of this over an editor like Notepad++ or Sublime is that I see all my notes in their folder. I guess I can resolve that by adding them to individual projects in Notepad++. Which only leaves the cross-platform availability.
While it's true that Joplin does take a lot of RAM, it also has way more functionality to offer than just a plain text or code editor 
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For example, you can add images, videos, etc. to notes and view them directly inside them. You can use the Rich Text Editor and edit notes visually as if you were using a word processor. You can also synchronise notes across a variety of devices. None of this is available in the aforementioned Notepad++ or Sublime Text.
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Agreed wholeheartedly! I do lose out on options like backlinks, mindmaps and graphs if I use NPP. For now, I am sticking with Joplin because some of the other markdown editors/knowledge mgmt apps that offer similar functionality are equally bad (or worse) resource hogs.
My issue is that much of my RAM is already tied up in resource heavy simulations/applications, and I use Joplin mostly to note down observations/results. I can't have my note-taking app to be competing with resources. I don't find myself using the audio/video aspect of Joplin that much, so no big loss there (for me personally). For general block diagrams (process flows, data models etc), I can just embed a Mermaid drawing. By the way, did you know that Notepad++ has a plugin that interprets Markdown just like the rich text editor does - wysiwig?
The long and short of it all is - I am just going to use the plugins that I NEED and not all the ones that I WANT.
Yeah, for similar reasons I've got just a few plugins installed. Only those that I find absolutely necessary. I've got a lot of RAM on my main desktop PC, so I don't care much about an application using 1 or 2 GB of RAM more there, however, this is a real problem elsewhere, especially with 16 GB or less total.
Didn't know that. What is the plugin's name? I'm only aware of some plugins that can render MD or HTML in a separate panel, but at least in the past, they were using the Internet Explorer engine built into Windows, which didn't do great job at rendering the code .
Yeah, it's a fairly decent plugin - MarkdownViewer++. It doesn't refresh on the fly - so not a true WYSIWIG editor - you have to hit a refresh button each time you make changes under the "View" menu item to see the latest changes.
So it's not a full fledged MD editor...but it will do in a pinch to make quick notes which can then be transferred to a full-fledged app like Joplin.
Also check out another one - Markdown Panel. It updates the right-side as you type on the left, but it doesn't have the export/send options the previous plugin does.
The plugin capability that Joplin has is great, but the fact that every one of them seems to have its own renderer is a head-scratcher for me, especially since the minimum RAM needed is apparently ~50 MB, which is what the Backup plugin uses when enabled. But a bare Joplin 3.2.12 uses ~400 MB of memory on macOS out of the box. My previous note taking app Quiver, which was a native application, was ~80 MB memory all in.
I get that in the modern era of Electron as the defacto standard for cross-platform applications I have to accept that I get a full browser environment, but having to use 15% of the base memory size to change the editor CSS (macOS theme) makes me facepalm every time.
As an aside, the fact that Joplin doesn't remember layout changes when you turn plugins on and off also makes me sad 