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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

#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 components. It may be that the 662 MB used by the "Renderer" is shared between many Windows components, so killing that Weather app may not reclaim as much space as you may hope, instead, it would require killing every user of the component, some may be core system apps.

In addition to the distinction between private and shared memory, there is also the distinction between actual RAM usage and and virtual memory. It is possible for a process to memory map a 100 GB file. If you look at the address space, it will take 100 GB more of virtual memory, even though it may be actually zero physical RAM, but it is not always zero either, the parts of the file that are currently accessed take up some space, which may later be reclaimed by the OS by committing the page to disk.

Even the most obvious "I do a big malloc()" kind of memory use is not that obvious, the OS can overcommit, put stuff into swap, use memory compression, etc... And it can do that even if the system is not overloaded, as to make more space for the disk cache for instance.

So seeing "1 GB" in the task manager is just a vague hint of how it may affect performance. And not all "task manager" tools give the same value for the same program (so Windows vs Mac may be misleading). "Process Explorer", a more advanced version of the Windows task manager can give a lot more details, with different values of memory usage depending on what you are looking at.

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

#182
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 662 MB used by the "Renderer" is shared between many Windows components

Fine, shutdown the weather and stock ticker apps.

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

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 MB is ridiculously overbloated. 1 MB or something in that vicinity should be more like it.

I think you guys on HN can be a bit out of touch maybe? On my linux machine (measured with tux-manager): nautilus 177 MB kitty 150 MB alacritty 107 MB mpv --idle --force-window 160 MB winit empty window + OpenGL context 100 MB tux-manager 69 MB hexchat 55 MB gnome-terminal 47 MB st 12 MB xterm 12 MB All these apps are what you would consider native, good apps. Written with Qt, GTK, some in low level langs like C\C++,…

> I think any empty Qt/GTK app eats 40 MB at least.

Classic GTK is (much) better (RSS on Linux):

  GTK2 14 MB
  GTK3 24 MB
Once it was decided that a desktop application must have fancy animation effects (like on smartphones) and be rendered completely on GPU things got very different:

  GTK4 98 MB

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

#184
post #172
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once worked on a project where the goal was to improve the reliability of MS Teams. The skip level manager was not happy when we said we cannot estimate what the revenue gain would be because it can't be measured.

This risks getting into the Fisherian/Bayesian stats wars again, but it would be possible to project a revenue gain, even in advance of making the change. You'd do this in terms of improved customer retention, lower cost of future customer acquisition, increased price a Teams license could sustain based on a rep for higher reliability, etc. Obviously it's not a change that you'd be able to pin a specific human decisi…

[dead]

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

#185

...you know, I keep reading all this stuff about memory prices, and it does suck, but memory is still much cheaper per gigabyte than it was ~15 years ago. Which matters because the things most consumers are doing on their computers haven't changed in the past 15 years. We browse the web, edit photos, message friends, and so on. AI generally runs on remote servers anyway. For years, everyone kept saying it was fine th…

15 years ago 4GB was comfortable and 8GB was abundant. Today 8GB is bare minimum.

Exactly, isn't that nuts? Especially when we're now paying 15-years-ago prices per gigabyte. What are we getting for that additional space?

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

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you guys on HN can be a bit out of touch maybe? On my linux machine (measured with tux-manager): nautilus 177 MB kitty 150 MB alacritty 107 MB mpv --idle --force-window 160 MB winit empty window + OpenGL context 100 MB tux-manager 69 MB hexchat 55 MB gnome-terminal 47 MB st 12 MB xterm 12 MB All these apps are what you would consider native, good apps. Written with Qt, GTK, some in low level langs like C\C++,…

These apps have codebases going back to the 2000s when having 256MB ram total was a big deal, yet these apps could contend with that (while offering pretty much identical functionality). I remember one of the big arguments for GTK against Qt was that C++ relied heavily on templates, thus every C++ app would have their own copies of the same functions in RAM, while GTK was C, and a lot of those library pages could be…

AFAIK, Qt's C++ extensions (moc, meta-object compiler) have nothing to do with how it reduces template bloat from containers, which is by moving some type-independent implementation parts to shared methods.

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

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s an equivalent app to make a comparison with, one from an OS company. But yeah, I still remember when a weather app would take 10 MB and I was complaining (1999)

10 MB is ridiculously overbloated. 1 MB or something in that vicinity should be more like it.

[deleted]

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

#188
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 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 weather app on my PC does in fact kill all child processes and frees up around 1GB of committed RAM. Are you not seeing the same?

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

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s an equivalent app to make a comparison with, one from an OS company. But yeah, I still remember when a weather app would take 10 MB and I was complaining (1999)

10MB to tell me the weather from a remote server... Let's remember that the sprawling world of Legend of Zelda SNES (a Link to the Past), including all graphics, music, code and dialogue was 1MB.

What else might that weather app be doing to justify the memory footprint? MS might suck at memory efficiency, but you can't claim they'd ever miss an opportunity to monetize their users. How can a weather app make MS money? MS has asked themselves this, so maybe we should too.

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

#190

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…

waiting for a quick simple straight forward tool on github that takes care of this... Anyone?
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