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Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

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Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#541

Post by zamalek »

GuB-42 wrote: post #515
calmingsolitude wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It may be that the 662 MB used by the "Renderer" is shared between many Windows components From the screenshot in the article, this is the memory usage of the Renderer process spawned by the Weather App. I find it very unlikely that some other app (say, the Copilot app) can then piggyback on Weather Renderer process. Do you have a source for this? > killing that Weather app may not reclaim as much space Closing the…

I am not on Windows 11 so I can't really tell. And even if I did, I may be in a different situation than yours, we may not be running the same apps so what is shared can be different. As for the "piggybacking" it is not really piggybacking, it is how shared libraries work (emphasis on the "shared"), aka. DLLs on Windows. For instance, if 2 to processes load "library.dll", it will be only loaded once, and the read-onl…

Additional constraint here: it's not just browser version. Processes have to refer to the same disk location for sharing to work. Given that each ships the full set of dependencies disk location will never match (except for their own child processes).

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#542

Post by bztzt »

dxxvi wrote: post #288

Is Chris Titus's tool able to remove the built-in Weather app (I haven't had a Windows machine with admin right for too long to remember that)? If yes, do we see 1 more GB of RAM free after running that tool?

You don't need a tool, you can just right-click and uninstall.

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#543

Post by novafunc »

ed_mercer wrote: post #292

They're pointing to macOS and saying it uses 5 times less RAM there, but is 230MB for a weather app really something to be proud off?

For comparison, I installed Gnome Weather and KDE Weather on my Linux system. Gnome Weather uses 150MB and KDE Weather uses 270MB (edit: more like 220MB, seems like 50MB was used in setup but never freed until I restarted the app).

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#544

Post by testerius »

So start creating quality, convenient and easy to use tools for native development and then create that quality software. You can use free/paid LLMs/agents/AI or don't use any AI. If something feels wrong then change it via next agent iteration on manually by hand. People complain but do opposite things or nothing at all :(

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#545

Post by thiht »

hurfdurf wrote: post #485
whatever1 wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 years ago I stated that we should stop worrying about software consuming a lot of ram. I had just built my pc with 128gb of ddr5 ram spending less than an average android phone (I think like $300). I would like to retract that statement. Thanks.

I stated that we should stop worrying about [X] consuming [finite resource]. Why would you ever say something like this? When was that ever true?

It's true when [finite resource] is indistinguishable from [infinite resource], meaning it's abundant, cheap, and can be used recklessly with no impact.

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#546

Post by raxxorraxor »

prplxd_nihilist wrote: post #529
raxxorraxor wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the Windows look and feel, I recommend Mint + Cinnamon. It took me about 15min to not miss anything on Windows and was shocked how I had forgotten how clean a system can be. Mandatory Windows accounts can still be circumvented with a console command for Win 11 installations, but the overall enshitification package just got worse and worse. Cinnamon is X11, but it works very well.

> Mandatory Windows accounts can still be circumvented with a console command for Win 11 installations Heard that's patched too

Did it the day before yesterday with a fresh win11 image from Microsoft (no rufus magic or anything). You can press shift + f10 and run a command I don't remember. It restarts the install process and lets you create a local account while it still patches the system before the first start (no fiddling with internet connections required). At least that still works.

At least for an install in vbox under Mint :)

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#547

Post by thiht »

stronglikedan wrote: post #367
GuB-42 wrote: post #181

Putting aside the fact that it is horribly bloated. Accurately measuring RAM usage is tricky, there are several measurements, and no "right" one. It is clear from the article that what eats up so much RAM is not the weather app itself but the framework it runs on. There is a "Renderer", a "GPU Process",... eating most of it. The thing that the task manager doesn't tell you is whether or not these are shared component…

The weather app itself and the framework it runs on are the same thing when talking about resource usage.

Not when the "framework" resources are shared between multiple apps using the same framework. This doesn't seem to be the case here though.

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#548

Post by GuB-42 »

zero_bias wrote: post #420
GuB-42 wrote: post #181

Putting aside the fact that it is horribly bloated. Accurately measuring RAM usage is tricky, there are several measurements, and no "right" one. It is clear from the article that what eats up so much RAM is not the weather app itself but the framework it runs on. There is a "Renderer", a "GPU Process",... eating most of it. The thing that the task manager doesn't tell you is whether or not these are shared component…

It used to be shared, but vast amount of insidious attacks like Heartbleed forced web engine developers to force strict isolation between everything

Only working memory (the writable part) has to be isolated between users of a shared component. Modern OSes and MMUs do it well. 2 processes using a shared OpenSSL library won't be able to peek at each other. At best, one process may be able to see that the other is using the library by doing some performance analysis, but working data never crosses border (barring a hardware or kernel-level bug).

It is not a problem of data going across process borders, it is about guaranteeing that each dependency is at the version for which the app has been tested with. From a security standpoint, it has pros and cons. The pro is that it is easier to qualify, and it makes the app less susceptible to system-level attacks and regressions. The con is that should a vulnerability be discovered in a dependency, it won't be fixed by a system update, you have to integrate the fix yourself and make a new release.

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#549

Post by deburo »

asdfman123 wrote: post #363
mrheosuper wrote: post #321

As embedded guy, sometime i wonder what those web devs are doing. A simple app that consumes multiple magnitude more RAM than the entire system i usually working with(~1MB). I assume it just does some HTTP query and render it on the screen, why the heck 1GB of RAM ?

There's a bunch of other requirements you need to meet and no one cares about RAM consumption. So you do it the most time efficient way, not the most memory efficient. Before you scorn, doing it the opposite way, taking more to use less memory, makes you less promotable, not more.

Perhaps no one cared about RAM consumption, but RAM is expensive again.

In this specific case, is your Weather app important enough to waste 1GB on your users' PCs? Most PCs only have 16 GB.

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#550

Post by onurtag »

hadrien01 wrote: post #254

What's worse is that the previous version of the same Weather app was fully native on Windows 10. Why would you take a perfectly working app and downgrade it like this?

They probably needed an electron web app that could run the (likely ~8MB+) javascript bundle loaded by their ad provider.

Sad reality aside; when the new app released I was using an old AppxBundle of the last good version downloaded from a microsoft store archive website. Later I fully uninstalled the app as it got annoying to cancel the autoupdate for that specific app. I use a random website now.

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