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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

#191

Post by fuzzfactor »

derac wrote: post #143
nashashmi wrote: post #29

Earlier 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)

I prompted my own windows taskbar weather app in rust with radar and forecasts and it's 233 kB. https://github.com/derac/WeatherTray I use Linux now, so you're on your own if there are issues. It might require some windows library to be installed but I don't recall. I ran it for a long while on win11.

That's embarrassing.

Not your app, it rocks.

Microsoft. It's like some decision-maker thinks it's OK to waste memory as long as it's someone (everyone) elses' memory, but it really adds up if you know anything about scale.

But what they're also doing is a non-businesslike under-utilization of their own resources.

Which is disgraceful in itself on top of that.

They're supposed to have much better AI than average and nobody even bothered to ask ChatGPT why in the world weather should take more than kilobytes?

And if their AI can't do it autonomously in under a megabyte it should be able to give a plausible explanation why not by now, and at least it would be orders of magnitude better than a gigabyte.

I assume yours went smoothly as prompted and it surely is an excellent example :)

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

#192

Post by SXX »

bilekas wrote: post #121
fragmede wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Insanity. 4GB was often not enough even back in late Windows 7 era.

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

#193

Post by usea »

beloch wrote: post #189
glimshe wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What else might that weather app be doing to justify the memory footprint? MS might suck at memory efficiency, but you can't claim they'd ever miss an opportunity to monetize their users. How can a weather app make MS money? MS has asked themselves this, so maybe we should too.

You're right that it's a matter of incentives, but it's because of cost not revenue.

It's bloated not because of a sneaky plan to include revenue generation. It's cheaper to make it bloated because quality is costly. They can externalize costs to users and nobody cares.

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

#194

Post by pharos92 »

I likely unfairly judge (at a high-level) code security based on how much system resources applications waste. If your app, or OS uses that much resource to perform simple operations then you clearly lack understanding of what the code is doing. How then can I expect it to be secure?

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

#195

Post by goalieca »

kvemkon wrote: post #183
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++,…

> I think any empty Qt/GTK app eats 40 MB at least. Classic GTK is (much) better (RSS on Linux): GTK2 14 MB GTK3 24 MB Once it was decided that a desktop application must have fancy animation effects (like on smartphones) and be rendered completely on GPU things got very different: GTK4 98 MB

GTK used to be considered the bloated option along with QT. My first Linux box had 128MB of ram and it was screaming fast.

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

#196

Post by goalieca »

torginus wrote: post #178
perching_aix wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

This would really help responsiveness. Keypress to pixel is a huge issue in these bloated frameworks which are running on top of bloated OS

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

#197

Post by lambdaone »

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)

250 MB is exactly the sort of bloat you'd expect from this sort of daft web-browser-wrapper application, and Apple get it there. 1.2 GB, on the other hand, is 5x as much, and completely insane even when you start off with daft as your starting point.

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

#198

Post by ack_complete »

GuB-42 wrote: post #181

Putting aside the fact that it is horribly bloated. Accurately measuring RAM usage is tricky, there are several measurements, and no "right" one. It is clear from the article that what eats up so much RAM is not the weather app itself but the framework it runs on. There is a "Renderer", a "GPU Process",... eating most of it. The thing that the task manager doesn't tell you is whether or not these are shared component…

> The thing that the task manager doesn't tell you is whether or not these are shared components. It may be that the 662 MB used by the "Renderer" is shared between many Windows components, so killing that Weather app may not reclaim as much space as you may hope, instead, it would require killing every user of the component, some may be core system apps.

It is the other way around, shared memory causes Task Manager to _underestimate_ memory usage. Task Manager's default views report the process private working set, no shared memory included. This means that 662MB is the _minimum_ amount of memory commit that would be released by ending the process.

> the OS can overcommit

Windows does not allow overcommit by default. It may compress or optimize memory allocations to reduce the physical working set, but the kernel will start failing memory allocations once physical + swap is exhausted regardless.

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

#199

Post by goalieca »

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…

> 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.

There’s very minimal state for a weather app. You should be able to sweep the whole thing pretty fast. You could probably statically allocate most of that state.

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

#200

Post by fuzzfactor »

lelanthran wrote: post #157
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…

> This took me down a rabbit whole. The rabbit was too hungry to even stop to chew you?

Beware the rabid rabbit and don't let your whole near his hole . . .
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