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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

#11

This article seems to be underestimating how much RAM a weather app should take. A well thought-out, native Weather app wouldn't take more than 100 mb of RAM.

This has strong "How much could a banana cost? 10 dollars?" vibes. Back in my day 100MB was all you had for all your compute, and somehow programs still ran.

LumiWeather for AmigaOS runs on 2 MB RAM.

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

#12

This article seems to be underestimating how much RAM a weather app should take. A well thought-out, native Weather app wouldn't take more than 100 mb of RAM.

This has strong "How much could a banana cost? 10 dollars?" vibes. Back in my day 100MB was all you had for all your compute, and somehow programs still ran.

When RAM was $100 per MB that would be $10,000. You can do a weather app in much less provided you use native code.

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

#13
...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 that Electron used gigabytes of memory, because on modern PCs memory was plentiful anyway. Well, it's not plentiful anymore! Maybe it's time software developers actually used resources efficiently?

Hey, you even have an LLM to help you now!

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

#14

This article seems to be underestimating how much RAM a weather app should take. A well thought-out, native Weather app wouldn't take more than 100 mb of RAM.

My favorite '90s weather app was WetSock. The installer was 1.5MB, though I don't recall the RAM usage. It showed a sunny/cloudy/etc. icon in the system tray, with the temperature in a tooltip:

https://web.archive.org/web/20010210023051/http://www.softse...

https://web.archive.org/web/20070210195451/http://www.locutu...

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

#15
post #9

This article seems to be underestimating how much RAM a weather app should take. A well thought-out, native Weather app wouldn't take more than 100 mb of RAM.

What is the weather app doing that it requires 100MB? For such a simple application, that seems excessive.

Mostly rendering. A bunch of images, text, UI elements. On a modern high resolution display it adds up quite quickly. You can surely cut it down a bit, but 100MB isn't absurd.

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

#16

...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…

But it's literally not cheaper than it was ~15 years ago? Right now RAM is the same price per GB as it was in 2007 and prices per GB look to continue to rise.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/scientist-say...

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

#17
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the weather app doing that it requires 100MB? For such a simple application, that seems excessive.

Mostly rendering. A bunch of images, text, UI elements. On a modern high resolution display it adds up quite quickly. You can surely cut it down a bit, but 100MB isn't absurd.

A weather widget using 8 bit color plus alpha on a 4k display show three full size images in 100mb. But I suspect that's not the ux we're talking about here, and a widget style system has no excuse.

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

#18

This article seems to be underestimating how much RAM a weather app should take. A well thought-out, native Weather app wouldn't take more than 100 mb of RAM.

This has strong "How much could a banana cost? 10 dollars?" vibes. Back in my day 100MB was all you had for all your compute, and somehow programs still ran.

Back in my days, I had to remove the mouse driver from autoexec so that microprose grand pirx had 600kb of ram to start

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

#19
post #4

It's just msn weather page. Can't they use one single browser for all their apps instead of one per app?

No, because you have to manage communication between different teams on "how" and "what" about the single browser, much easier to let every team do their "best" without any external interference

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

#20
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the weather app doing that it requires 100MB? For such a simple application, that seems excessive.

Mostly rendering. A bunch of images, text, UI elements. On a modern high resolution display it adds up quite quickly. You can surely cut it down a bit, but 100MB isn't absurd.

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