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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

#111

Post by cogman10 »

As time goes on, I become more and more convinced that OSes need some sort of OS level GC pool which all GCed languages play in rather than having the language runtime provide the GC.

A major part of why these sort of simple applications are taking gbs of memory is because the GC wants to simply grow as much as it can to avoid pauses/jank. There might be 10% of the memory which is actually live in that 1gb. But because it allocates fast enough, the extra headroom is needed.

Even if it isn't the case that the GC is universal, having a shared GC amongst runtimes would be a boon in general. If I have 3 JVMs running, I might give them all 1gb of memory even though really each of them only needs 200mb to get their job done. The extra headroom is for when a burst happens. If I could combine all 3 into 1, I could save a lot of allocation overhead and general memory.

This does sort of exist in java (war deployments), but there are limitations that make it unappealing. For example, each of the JVMs have to be the same version.

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

#112

Post by perching_aix »

Const-me wrote: post #83
blackhaz wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

10 MB is not too bad for a GUI app. If the app is full screen, display is FullHD and has 8 bit depth, that's almost 8 MB memory for the back buffer alone. Enable HDR and pixels become 8 bytes RGBA16_Float instead of 4 bytes BGRA8_Unorm, twice as much memory.

This is only relevant if we assume CPU rendering. The article described system RAM use, not video RAM use. Task Manager doesn't combine the two.

They clearly spent it on maintaining their independent Chromium instance instead.

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

#113

Post by superjan »

undebuggable wrote: post #100

An app which could have been a website.

I don’t know if this is sarcastic. A lot of bloat in GUI apps is because they are built as websites with a bloated front end, dependencies, custom fonts plus the binary compiled code and the decompressed images cached by the browser.

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

#114

Post by pixelesque »

anthk wrote: post #51
charleslmunger wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Vector icons. It can be fit under 50MBs.

Those still have to be rasterised to a pixel-based frame buffer at render/compositing time.

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

#115

Post by keicwifjwud »

201984 wrote: post #89
mort96 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Your designers want Sometimes, you need to tell the designers NO. Moving background images don't help people figure out what the weather is going to be.

And sometimes your engineers need to be a LOT less stingy. 1GB is clearly overkill for an app such as this, but ~300MB is perfectly acceptable if it works well, looks good and does what it should do.

There is such a thing as overdesign, but when you’re building a modern application, you must trust your designer’s sense of aesthetics and knowledge of UX patterns—two things engineers are often notoriously bad at.

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

#116

Post by SBArbeit »

rahulmax wrote: post #92

"Windows users are fundamentally willing to put up with more bullshit than MacOS or Linux users." I read this circa 2010 and it stuck with me ever since. Also, have felt this way over the years, when I see Windows users work.

Super interesting; it's been exactly the opposite in my experience. MacOS/iOS users put up with whatever Apple is telling them they should love - Liquid Glass, right? App Store restrictions, right? Lousy AI, right? - whether it's true or not. Linux users are willing to put up with any amount of work - i.e. bullshit - to make their installations work just to get a UX that's almost as good as Windows from 20 years ago.

As for Windows, I like living in cities. If you live in a city long enough - at least through a couple of major macroeconomic cycles - you'll see it improve in some ways and some neighborhoods, get worse in some ways and some neighborhoods, then improve again, etc. Cycles. Windows found itself in a downturn the last few years, primarily due to the org structure that took Windows shell away from people who could really look after it, and, yes some of those execs have earned my permanent scorn, like a bad local politician would. Now there's a focused team making that neighborhood better. I'm here for the whole ride.

I'll use Linux on computers I don't have to log into very much, so I don't have that UX problem (case-sensitive command lines? Seriously? The 1970's called...). I'll never move to MacOS City; it's like wanting to live in The Villages. Manicured lawns with no soul.

So I live in Windows Town, it's not perfect, no city is, but it's always changing, always moving, going through ups and downs, and now it has a new "city council" that's making changes for the better. And I'm expert enough to make it great for me, and avoid the "neighborhoods" that suck.

This article highlights a problem that Windows has right now, and one which I agree with, which is shipping web apps instead of native. For now, I have a workaround for it:

1. Install uBlock Origin in Edge. 2. Start Edge, browse to MSN Weather. 3. Click the "Add an Application" button in the address bar so I have a Start Menu icon for the page. 4. Delete the in-box Weather app icon.

Now I have the same weather site, no ads, running in about 130MB of RAM.

Enjoy your choice of operating system. Live where you want. Sometimes your city has problems. Move if you want, but don't think you've permanently solved your UX issues if you do, you've just swapped them for different ones.

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

#117

Post by glimshe »

nashashmi wrote: post #29
eviks wrote: post #25

> By comparison, Apple's native Weather app on macOS reportedly uses less than 250 MB of RAM That's also bloated, couldn't they find a better comparison to illustrate the egregious waste?

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.

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

#118

Post by Dylan16807 »

mort96 wrote: post #77
Dylan16807 wrote: post #76

Earlier 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.

Windows 98 wasn't composited, which makes a huge difference. And to be clear, there's a ton of unnecessary bloat today as well. It's just that even a lean and mean highly hand optimized native app is gonna be way bigger today than it was then, due to compositing, higher resolution assets, higher resolution screens and different design sensibilities. But most apps aren't lean and mean highly hand optimized native apps…

Compositing means you can excuse an extra dozen megabytes per megapixel of window size. The window in the article is less than a megapixel. That factors in the relevant part of screen resolution too. High resolution assets should scale alongside window size too, adding a fraction of the above dozen megabytes.

And I'm saying 98SE already had image-heavy design sensibilities all over.

You don't have to highly hand optimize to run a weather UI in a lean way.

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

#119

Post by keicwifjwud »

karmakurtisaani wrote: post #5
iamcoder18 wrote: post #2

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 day

Back in my day systems used to be a lot simpler too. These “back in my mind” comparisons show a clear lack of understanding of the subject matter. 1996 apps are not the same as 2026 apps. Expectations are different. Design languages are different. Even the UX is entirely different.

1GB is clearly overkill, no question. But ~100MB to ~300MB is perfectly reasonable and you know it.

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

#120

Post by SBArbeit »

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 block from the built-in Weather icon.

(Also, go into Widget settings and turn off "Discover / Microsoft Start feed". Same crap, different surface. Get rid of it.)

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