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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

#371

Post by ProllyInfamous »

dimgl wrote: post #290
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…

> Easy workaround for this Wipe Windows from your machine. Use Arch Linux. Problem solved.

The most-difficult part of installing any Linux distro is getting the motivation to create the boot media. Luckily for Ubuntu (I'm running v26) you can use an old HD or USB and then [your flavor of LLM] to then walk you through the steps on how to make the media bootable (at least: that's what I did). I am a bluecollar electrician (yes, it took me a few tries; yes, I accidentally fucked up my first few OS's doing stupid not-recommended shit).

----

Highly recommend Ubuntu; I've dabbled in the past, but the fact that AMD and nVIDIA drivers are pre-installed, in a user-friendly GUI installer... is what has helped me make Linux my main desktop (over the past half-year). Bought a Microcenter prebuilt and never even booten Win11 (straight to Ubuntu installer).

Over the past three decades, I have really tried to like several Linux'es, but have always reverted to (e.g:) Win7 or MacOS. Being able to run local LLM-models is what led me to Ubuntu (RX580->VEGA64->5070Ti)... it's been a journey =P

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

#372

Post by fireant »

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…

Separate Renderer and GPU Process is just typical webview2/electron

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

#373

Post by josephg »

LPisGood wrote: post #369
SirMaster wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens if you keep asking AI to rewrite it to use less and less resources?

It’s actually pretty good at this if you have some very specific constraints and objective.

I find I get great results from explicitly asking an LLM to write tests which profile memory and cpu usage. Then ask it to optimise to improve those metrics.

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

#375

Post by trinix912 »

cherryteastain wrote: post #256

For comparison, the GNOME Weather app takes 80MB.

Which, in a way, is still a lot. I personally wouldn’t expect a weather app, no matter how fancy, to use more than 50MB, and that should be more than enough. One can get pretty far with just native UI controls, even eye candy wise.

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

#376

Post by brokenmachine »

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.

And this is why Windows will have it's lunch eaten by Linux.

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

#377

Post by fireant »

ashleyn wrote: post #135
firefoxd wrote: post #36

This took me down a rabbit whole. Why can a simple single purpose app not be just a couple megabytes if not less? The popular options are electron 100MB+, or embedding python3 in your executable which is at least 40MB. But if you build it natively, you should have all of Microsoft tools at your disposition, dlls and such. In theory, this should allow you to make a 1 mb app or less. But in practice, it's the worse opt…

A lot of these applications run in Electron or similar libraries where a whole new browser instance, with all its overhead, is stood up for each application. The simplest answer is we need to stop trying to use web technologies as a one-size-fits-all GUI toolkit.

Chromium is actually fairly efficient when shared across multiple applications. If the webview2, which is probably what the weather app uses, would not create a whole browser per application but rather just the renderer process and the rest shared system wide it would be a couple hundred megs at most.

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

#378

Post by trinix912 »

leduyquang753 wrote: post #374
3dedb728-3f77 wrote: post #180

What if we make all these apps obsolete with 100 tools < 100mb.

That only nerds will use because the UI is only ASCII art on a black terminal screen?

Have you never used fully native software? All UI code is in the system DLLs that are already loaded with the OS so you can have a nice GUI program with no fuss and no extra memory requirements besides the little code your app requires. See Nirsoft utilities for an example.

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

#379

Post by WelkinFolk »

ProllyInfamous wrote: post #371
dimgl wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Easy workaround for this Wipe Windows from your machine. Use Arch Linux. Problem solved.

The most-difficult part of installing any Linux distro is getting the motivation to create the boot media . Luckily for Ubuntu (I'm running v26) you can use an old HD or USB and then [your flavor of LLM] to then walk you through the steps on how to make the media bootable (at least: that's what I did). I am a bluecollar electrician (yes, it took me a few tries; yes, I accidentally fucked up my first few OS's doing st…

Agree with this. As much as Ubuntu is derided for several reasons, it just works. I tinkered with different distros for years, and while it was super fun, I wasn't very productive. Ubuntu and Fedora are the only distros where stuff just worked for me.

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

#380

Post by josephg »

iknowstuff wrote: post #355
josephg wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ported the leptos rust web framework to run on native platforms. Currently it works on ios, macos and linux (GTK). Eventually want to also add support for windows and TUI as well. It uses taffy for layout - which gives you the same flexbox and grid layout engines that web browsers use. Components are all fully native for the platform, via their corresponding binding crates (objc, gtk4, etc). UI library is here: htt…

SwiftUI’s diffing is such a mess that I wouldn’t be surprised if fine-grained reactivity of a toolkit binding UIKit like this worked better. Do you have decent support for long lists via UITableView yet? Edit: it seems so!

Yeah! I added it for my ios scheduling app.

I tried to learn SwiftUI a few years ago. XCode was horribly slow, and it would hang and crash all the time, even when working on small example projects. I'm excited by the thought that I can use any rust IDE to write UI code. Rust's compiler, toolchain and IDEs seem way more reliable.

The view! builder macro at the moment is designed to look like JSX, since it was ported directly from leptos. But I'm considering dropping the jsx and using a fluent API. Something like this:

    let count = RwSignal::new(0u32);

    let view = vstack().padding(16.0).gap(12.0)
        .child(label().text(move || format!("Count: {}", count.get())))
        .child(
            hstack().gap(8.0)
                .child(button()
                    .on_click(move |_| count.update(|c| *c = 0))
                    .text("Clear"))
                .child(button()
                    .on_click(move |_| count.update(|c| *c -= 1))
                    .text("-1"))
                .child(button()
                    .on_click(move |_| count.update(|c| *c += 1))
                    .text("+1"))
        );
Code is a bit less readable like this, but autocomplete and cmd+click all works out of the box in your IDE.
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