Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

notebookcheck.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 619 posts

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

#121

Post by bilekas »

fragmede wrote: post #90
david-gpu wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much money are these companies going to make by reducing their weather app to 1MB, or 10MB? How much is it going to cost them to get there? The world doesn't run on personal aesthetics, when nobody is willing to pay for them.

The MacBook Neo has only 8GiB of RAM. This is widely decried as not enough. The RAMpocalypse means that 8 GiB is going to have to be enough or else it'll eat into Apple's margins. The Neos are wildly popular though because people have used it and 8 GiB is fine. So while the singular weather app being smaller itself isn't material, in aggregate, macOS being more efficient is something that lets Apple sell a lower spec…

Let's not ignore the new "windows copilot laptops" that come with 4GiB.

https://en.gamegpu.com/news/zhelezo/defitsit-pamyati-zastavi...

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

#122

Post by keicwifjwud »

SBArbeit wrote: post #116
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.…

> Liquid Glass, right? App Store restrictions, right? Lousy AI, right?

Liquid Glass needs a lot of cleaning up but it’s fine. App Store restrictions mean very little for iOS users in general and next to nothing for Mac users. Lousy AI also means little to nothing on Mac and earns at max a shrug on iOS—you even have a handy little button to disable all Apple Intelligence shenanigans altogether which is something no Windows user can easily do with Copilot.

No, Apple users are most definitely not having to deal with the same level of bullshit Microsoft’s users are. And it’s not even close.

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

#123

Post by anabab »

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.

2 bit 160x144px ought to be enough for anything

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

#124

Post by pjmlp »

cogman10 wrote: post #111

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 becau…

Which is what OSes implemented in system languages with automatic memory management usually do, it is an OS service.

Oberon example,

https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/ProjectOberon/Sources/Kerne...

Active Oberon example,

https://github.com/btreut/a2/blob/master/source/GarbageColle...

Bare metal Java, Go, .NET, Erlang, OCaml,... with bare metal deployments naturally have the runtime take the OS role.

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

#125

Post by cromka »

I seriously wonder if the recent migrations between languages mande by major projects leveraging SOTA LLMs have started a new trend of a) making native apps more common, as opposed to Electron and stuff b) will help to optimize existing apps and remove the bloat.

The alternative is, of course, that most apps will end up being bloated even more specifically because of how we'll slowly transition into developing using LLMs only.

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

#126

Post by tredre3 »

hyperhello wrote: post #10

I would like to be assured that the author knows the difference between actual memory and setting aside paging space.

The author doesn't need to know the difference because the task manager is accurate by default. I can still offer you some reassurance:

- The Windows task manager's memory column is the private working set which is the actual memory used by the application minus shared memory (but only shared memory that is currently shared with other processes, not merely marked shared. I.E. it's similar to RES - SHR on Linux but it's more accurate)

- Windows doesn't overcommit memory. Memory that is reserved but unused (not touching all pages) by the app is truly wasted. I mention this because in your other comment you make it clear that you think this is happening. But Windows isn't Linux.

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

#127

Post by kmfrk »

Shame, because it's genuinely a great map - ahem, optimizations aside.

I remember giving the app a second chance - after assuming it to be bloatware next to all the other default apps that came with Windows - but after seeing it redeem itself in benchmarks[1], I gave it a shot and quite like it. The iOS app was too rubbish to bother with, though.

I'm curious what could options there are for decent predictions. Especially with Dark Sky never having been much of an option for Europe. I see some of the people behind it have a new subscription-based iOS app to try, though: https://acmeweather.com/app.

Do people have any desktop weather apps that strike a nice balance between decent code and actually useful predictions? Future weather's likely to be anything but boring, unfortunately.

[1]: https://forecastwatch.com/awards/2026/

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

#128

Post by aniceperson »

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…

1. install ublock origin on Firefox.

not even being annoying, edge is removing manifest v2 very soon, breaking proper ad blocks just like chrome

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

#129

Post by SSLy »

kmfrk wrote: post #127

Shame, because it's genuinely a great map - ahem, optimizations aside. I remember giving the app a second chance - after assuming it to be bloatware next to all the other default apps that came with Windows - but after seeing it redeem itself in benchmarks[1], I gave it a shot and quite like it. The iOS app was too rubbish to bother with, though. I'm curious what could options there are for decent predictions. Especi…

My country's agency for weather and water mgmt has consistently the best 48h forecast. Try looking for an equivalent in yours.

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

#130

Post by mwkaufma »

cogman10 wrote: post #111

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 becau…

The ram usage in this case is an order of magnitude lower if you install ublock in edge, as other comments have noted. Why would a system level GC affect wasteful adtech?

Any marginal efficiency gains will be wiped out with more adslop. Nathan's law.

Post reply on HN