Anything above 50MB RAM for this is shameful imo and reflect poor engineering.
Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
101–110 of 618 posts
Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
#102An app which could have been a website.
Is it not?
> Instead, it is essentially an MSN Weather web app built on Microsoft's WebView2 framework. Task Manager shows multiple Chromium-based subprocesses running simultaneously, which contributes to the unusually high RAM usage.
Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
The KDE Plasma weather app takes in maximum 1MB.
I'm not sure if you're reply hunting or we talk about different apps but how would you fit the Qt runtime, Javascript runtime, font cache, graphics, networking libraries, etc in this limit? This can't physically be under 70 MB, and more like 100-200+ MB.
Many of those things are already in memory just from running an empty desktop.
Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
#104This 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…
Pictures and frame buffers. If you're running fullscreen at 4k, you're probably gonna take two roughly 3840x2160x3 byte frame buffers for the window. Your designers want a background image which moves as you scroll in some parallax style; that's over 3840x2160x3 bytes more for the pixel buffer backing the image layer. And let's say roughly 50% of your screen is text with subpixel (aka full color) anti aliasing; that…
Good point. Though 4k image assets mean more that they look in 4k, not that their size is 4k. It might not be 87mb, but still way more than the couple mb I suggested.
Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
But we went from 1080p monitors to 5k monitors and so we are pushing 7x the number of pixels and at roughly twice the bits per pixel.
True, but I don't really think that accounts for the increase in memory usage.
No but it's the biggest one that's easy to forget.
Feature factory work increases the surface area of every API you touch, and the proliferation of pre-written APIs expands the number of APIs you touch. The combination of the two is not quite O(n²) but the exponent is more than 1, so it's still geometric.
Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows 98 SE kind of went overboard with the graphics (remember Active Desktop?), and a common screen size at the time was 1280x1024. But if you run modern stuff at 1080p (60% more pixels) or 720p ( fewer pixels), you're not going to see comparable memory use.
> and a common screen size at the time was 1280x1024 Maybe if you were really rich and only used high end desktops. A lot of the computers I used back then were still 800x600, fancier ones were 1024x768. If you happened to also have a 2D accelerator card you'd potentially have 1280x1024. And lots of apps purposefully ran at a much lower color depth, it was common for games to run at 8 or 16 bit color mode.
I saw a lot of computers set to 800x600 but I don't recall any that couldn't be switched to at least 1024x768. Which is still quite close to 720p for making this comparison.
And yeah lots of fullscreen-ish things ran in lower color, but this is about desktop mode and I never saw a desktop mode that struggled based on color depth.
Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
#107Earlier 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.
I mean, you're getting dumped on for this, but it seems about right?
For an extreme example:
curl https://wttr.in/
https://github.com/brndnmtthws/conky/wiki/Lua:-Shell-Integra...
Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
#108I wonder if this is a fair calculation including the fact that multiple WebView apps should be sharing the same libraries in memory.
If you pay 0.5-1GB to load the edge/chromium libraries but that memory is amortized over N different apps the user is likely to run, then the ”1GB for the weather app” is an unlikely worst case.
Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
The KDE Plasma weather app takes in maximum 1MB.
I'm not sure if you're reply hunting or we talk about different apps but how would you fit the Qt runtime, Javascript runtime, font cache, graphics, networking libraries, etc in this limit? This can't physically be under 70 MB, and more like 100-200+ MB.
Sibling comment called it: these are dynamic libs used by the desktop, so the incremental RAM usage is low. That's a good approach! Makes me wonder what the heck MS is doing to get their app to add an incremental gig to memory usage.
Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
#110My gaming PC that I built in January 2006 that IIRC I used to simultaneously run Battlefield 2, Trillian, Xfire, Thunderbird, and Winamp with a 1680x1050 monitor had 1 GB of total system RAM.
take me back