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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

#211

Post by justsomehnguy »

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…

> The MacBook Neo has only 8GiB of RAM. This is widely decried as not enough.

Bwahahah!

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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

#212

Post by RunSet »

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?

https://github.com/dglent/meteo-qt

It is using 122.7 MB at present.

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

#213

Post by firefoxd »

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?

Haha, and it's far too late to edit!

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

#214

Post by aucisson_masque »

mort96 wrote: post #54
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…

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…

> i'm playing a bit fast and loose with what lives on the GPU and what lives on the CPU here. On many systems, they share a memory pool anyway. But on systems with discrete GPUs, most of this is gonna be video memory

Yeah this is irrelevant here, windows doesn't share both in 99 of the case.

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

#216

Post by therealdrag0 »

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.

Many people enjoy a tasteful weather app. Granted a “minimal” UX toggle would be easy to add to reduce memory for those who cared.

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

#217

Post by afdbcreid »

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…

This is far from trivial. Consider the WasmGC proposal, which had a somewhat similar goal.

Then C# came and said "we can't use it, we have different needs". So did Go.

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

#218

Post by sssilver »

fuzzfactor wrote: post #191
derac wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

> It's like some decision-maker thinks it's OK to waste memory as long as it's someone (everyone) elses' memory

My friend, you're giving them way too much credit.

Nobody, especially no decision-maker involved with this, has ever spent a single thought anywhere near any concept related to memory.

It just literally never crossed anyone's mind.

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

#219

Post by christophilus »

keicwifjwud wrote: post #115
201984 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Dunno. Many designers are pretty bad at UX. They’re OK at aesthetics, but that’s not the same thing.
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