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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

#581

Post by mrheosuper »

vel0city wrote: post #513
mrheosuper wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our storage can transfer Gigabytes of data, do hundred thousand operations every second. The hardware is more than capable. If your software stutter when streaming few hundred KBs of data, it's on you.

Bandwidth and latency are two different things. The latency of handling things in system memory is still pretty different than the latency of handling stuff on SSDs.

Still, it should not be more than few miliseconds, it's solid state.

Im pretty sure most of the latency come from the software.

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

#582

Post by kasabali »

rootlocus wrote: post #391
kasabali wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You say tomato we say tomahto At the end of the day bloated app is a bloated app its consequences are the same.

10 apss using 100mb each plus 600mb shared use less ram than 10 apps using 200mb each.

Still goddamn bloat. No amount of sharing will change that.

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

#583

Post by fragmede »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #211
fragmede wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The MacBook Neo has only 8GiB of RAM. This is widely decried as not enough. The RAMpocalypse means that 8 GiB is going to have to be enough or else it'll eat into Apple's margins. The Neos are wildly popular though because people have used it and 8 GiB is fine. So while the singular weather app being smaller itself isn't material, in aggregate, macOS being more efficient is something that lets Apple sell a lower spec…

> The MacBook Neo has only 8GiB of RAM. This is widely decried as not enough. Bwahahah! https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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

#584

Post by rescbr »

ethbr1 wrote: post #493
lesostep wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> AI writes code like that, but people get pretty upset hearing it. To this day I never saw an AI write anything less than a 3Mb binary. Do you have specific examples in mind, and if so, can you share them?

AI currently writes median-good code which is by definition better than the worst developers' code. In order to push beyond that (e.g. architecture, size, performance), the human has to bring the constraints. There's only so much AI can/should default assume from "write code for me" (which I expect a lot of bad / non-HN developers are doing). It is exciting that there's an opportunity for global improvement though! A…

AI doesn't get tired. I can tell it to profile the application and find quick wins and it usually does a decent enough job.

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

#585

Post by goalieca »

inigyou wrote: post #240
goalieca wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GTK used to be considered the bloated option along with QT. My first Linux box had 128MB of ram and it was screaming fast.

What was the lean option?

There were a number of smaller libraries closer to the X11 primitives for drawing. Motif was one that i recall which powered opencde and like environments. We had used it for an industrial control system. I ended up using fluxbox as my windows manager for a while which has its own toolkit for decorating windows and drawing menus. It was quite a bit lighter than gnome and pretty much thinly wrapped XFT (fonts), and xlib for drawing, etc.

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

#586

Post by mminer237 »

thiht wrote: post #545
hurfdurf wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Aside from air, ocean water, sunlight, and a few types of rocks, I don't know if that's ever the case. Pretty much as soon as something is declared "free", people will consume so much more than you could have ever imagined.

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

#587

Post by inigyou »

bzzzt wrote: post #557
inigyou wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Super Mario Brothers is none of that, but fits in a 40kB ROM and a few kB of RAM.

Atari 2600 titles are between 1 and 4Kb and have 128 bytes of RAM. Still enough for some quality entertainment back in its time.

They're pretty seriously limiting though when you actually look at those games. The GameCube/PS2 is probably the era where hardware was finally good enough to make the game you wanted.

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

#588

Post by efreak »

SBArbeit wrote: post #120

Easy workaround for this: 1. Install uBlock Origin in Edge. 2. Start Edge, browse to MSN Weather. 3. Click the "Add an Application" button in the address bar to get a Start Menu icon for the page. 4. Delete the in-box Weather app icon. Now you get the same Weather app in about 130MB of RAM, with no ads. It's not as nice as a native app, of course, but it's 1000% better than the useless ads and MSN feed that you can't…

As much as I hate the weather app myself, this isn't an equivalent solution. The weather app shows the temperature in the taskbar itself, without opening anything. Also, I don't keep my browser open 24/7, so it's more than just loading a single extra tab, you need to wait for the browser process itself to start up.

If you want to load weather in a browser from the taskbar instead of having it available without having to open another application, I'd recommend using dillo or some such to load wttr.in or similar. A single http request that loads fast from a comparatively simple application that also loads fast. You might even be able to load it as a .hta file.

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

#589

Post by odo1242 »

danpalmer wrote: post #334
exceptione wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relatively optimized? typo?

I think this depends on perspective. Compared to an Electron app, it's significantly better. Compared to a hand-optimised app implemented in a low level language it's not great. I've not done a lot of Swift/iOS/macOS, but I have a passing familiarity. These numbers are basically what I'd expect for a normal app. In other words I think the relative optimisation comes from the fundamentally better technology choice rat…

Yea this is what I meant. I guess a more accurate phrasing would be "feels reasonably optimized." Qualitatively in terms of (lack of) graphical stutters and whatnot the macOS one feels very smooth.

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

#590

Post by odo1242 »

danpalmer wrote: post #333
odo1242 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was able to do some tests with AI agent help and got: - ~45 MB on buffers for animated backgrounds - ~10 MB used for the Swift language runtime (runtime type information) - ~44 MB used for system libraries: libSwiftCore, CoreFoundation, libobjc, Metal, VFX - ~21 MB used on GPU buffers (GPU memory is also part of used system memory because of unified memory) - ~6.3 MB for the weatherd daemon that actually collects t…

Nice find and summary. Of I'm not surprised to see the ~75MB for the high graphical fidelity of the app. I am however surprised that 10MB is Swift language runtime - with ABI compat this is supposed to be shared, and that the weather daemon is >6MB (surely this is just a simple API client?!).

Oh yea, something worth mentioning is that my analysis did not consider what memory was shared or not. That might influence the actual numbers. I believe the amount of memory used by the weatherd daemon also includes code and not just the heap memory, so the libraries that weatherd loads would be included in that.
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