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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

#171

Post by torginus »

magackame wrote: post #138
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.

I think you guys on HN can be a bit out of touch maybe? On my linux machine (measured with tux-manager): nautilus 177 MB kitty 150 MB alacritty 107 MB mpv --idle --force-window 160 MB winit empty window + OpenGL context 100 MB tux-manager 69 MB hexchat 55 MB gnome-terminal 47 MB st 12 MB xterm 12 MB All these apps are what you would consider native, good apps. Written with Qt, GTK, some in low level langs like C\C++,…

These apps have codebases going back to the 2000s when having 256MB ram total was a big deal, yet these apps could contend with that (while offering pretty much identical functionality). I remember one of the big arguments for GTK against Qt was that C++ relied heavily on templates, thus every C++ app would have their own copies of the same functions in RAM, while GTK was C, and a lot of those library pages could be shared. Qt even did some nonstandard tricks to cut down on this duplication, which was unpopular with the C++ people.

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

#172

Post by mpyne »

dasyud wrote: post #64
SlightlyLeftPad wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“What value are you bringing to the company?” translates to “if you’re not printing money, you lose your job.”

I once worked on a project where the goal was to improve the reliability of MS Teams. The skip level manager was not happy when we said we cannot estimate what the revenue gain would be because it can't be measured.

This risks getting into the Fisherian/Bayesian stats wars again, but it would be possible to project a revenue gain, even in advance of making the change. You'd do this in terms of improved customer retention, lower cost of future customer acquisition, increased price a Teams license could sustain based on a rep for higher reliability, etc.

Obviously it's not a change that you'd be able to pin a specific human decision-maker (who was marginal on Teams) down as to this change being the difference between a sale or not, but nor is the change in revenue going to be a random number uniformly distributed in (-∞,∞).

If the change was revenue-neutral, the skip level would probably have been justified in seeing if the teams working that project could have found something to do customers actually care about instead.

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

#173

Post by baal80spam »

whynotmaybe wrote: post #18
karmakurtisaani wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Good times.

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

#174

Post by torginus »

preg_match wrote: post #144
magackame wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you guys on HN can be a bit out of touch maybe? On my linux machine (measured with tux-manager): nautilus 177 MB kitty 150 MB alacritty 107 MB mpv --idle --force-window 160 MB winit empty window + OpenGL context 100 MB tux-manager 69 MB hexchat 55 MB gnome-terminal 47 MB st 12 MB xterm 12 MB All these apps are what you would consider native, good apps. Written with Qt, GTK, some in low level langs like C\C++,…

Yes these are all very, very complex applications though. But I agree: using more memory is good, actually, because it means more stuff is being cached. Nautilus is probably pre-indexing directory structure so it doesn't have to read disk every single time you open your home folder. That's good. Oh, and thumbnails. Thumbnails are incredibly expensive memory wise, but very useful! Also modern apps have A LOT built-in.…

Counterpoint: Nautilus is both slower and less stable than Windows Explorer on large folders, even though the Linux filesystem is much faster. These super-indexed desktop linux search functions are also dog slow, while `grep` and `find` in the terminal are much faster (for searching inside files), and those certainly don't cache anything.

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

#175

Post by userbinator »

After seeing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49226923 show up here, I'm now hoping someone will vibe-code a nearly identical-looking native app that takes a few orders of magnitude less RAM.

Personally I just use my government's website when I need to check the forecast.

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

#176

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#177

Post by satvikpendem »

cissikatt wrote: post #170
satvikpendem wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need anything more than https://wttr.in/ even with all the fancy terminal graphics.

Why would I like to know the weather in some other city?

What do you mean? It gets the weather for your city via your IP address, maybe you're on a VPN.

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

#178

Post by torginus »

perching_aix wrote: post #112
Const-me wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One thing shared between old software rendered desktops and modern videogames is that they shunned these intermediate 'composited' screens. On the desktop, there used to be the screen, and basically windows used to draw on top of each other, there was no intermediate buffer for the whole window to draw itself to, which would then be smushed together with all others.

Video games are the same (mostly) - everything is rendered in screen space for performance reasons, it's very, very rare, that you would render something into a temporary buffer then composite it on top of the rest of the scene - you would need exceptional reasons for that.

Maybe it's time to get back to the olden days of display servers - where applications would push a list of render commands to the 'display server', which would consist of rendering primitives, which would then take these commands and construct the whole UI on the screen, without the intermediate steps of each app drawing into its own little buffer.

You could always fall back to drawing your own applciations, then asking the display server to composite that, but that would pretty much be the exception, not the norm.

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

#179

Post by mmis1000 »

strong-self wrote: post #136

i used WKWebView highlightr wrapper around highlight.js for syntax highlighting on iOS, and the webview was the biggest memory line in the app

i mean webKit never handle viewport well when compare to firefox or chrome. it's willing to materialize a 10000*10000 texture when firefox and chrome will think that is too dumb and only load the visible part. It's not a good target if you want to compare windows and mac software quality.
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