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

221–230 of 621 posts

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

#221

Post by userbinator »

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…

They're supposed to have much better AI than average

I suspect there will be a bit of revelation once people realise how much better AI can make software if prompted correctly. Of course a lot of slop will always exist, but things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49226923 show that it can be a powerful force multiplier if used right.

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

#222

Post by well_ackshually »

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…

??? Fast and loose is an understatement, at best it's a view from a rendering engineer that thinks all software acquires a DXGI swap chain and handles buffering itself, but it's flat out wrong and over two times too high at the very least.

* Not every app is full screen (especially not a weather widget.)

* Very few people actually have a 4K display. 1080p and 1440p cover over 75% of users already.

* You do not allocate a separate buffer for the main content and the parallax, applying a different transform does not need a dedicated buffer, just something the size of your asset. It can be a 640x480 upscaled asset for all you care.

* You also don't allocate a dedicated buffer for text rendering/hinting. Your text rendering engine keeps a texture atlas in a buffer which is eventually maaaaaybe reach a 4k texture if you display a TON of various glyphs, realistically they won't. DirectWrite will also share this atlas with other executables unless you explicitly ask for isolation.

* On windows, you write to DWM, which keeps a single buffet for all your windows. Every window does not pay that memory price. I'm pretty sure most compositors do something similar.

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

#223

Post by Narishma »

satvikpendem wrote: post #177
cissikatt wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your IP address doesn't automatically correspond to your city, even without a VPN.

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

#224

Post by christophilus »

fsflover wrote: post #165
shooly wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, if the only things you can name are Liquid Glass, App Store and not-so-intelligent AI then it seems like Apple users are actually doing quite well? It's impossible for every idea to be a hit. Liquid Glass was a miss and they backtracked on some changes and fixed some issues that people were vocal about.

Apple's Software Quality Crisis (eliseomartelli.it) 1196 points by ajdude on March 3, 2025 | 1213 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075

It’s still much, much better than windows. And Linux is better still.

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

#225

Post by satvikpendem »

Narishma wrote: post #223
satvikpendem wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Your IP address doesn't automatically correspond to your city, even without a VPN.

Then add your city as an argument to the curl. It works well enough regardless and doesn't use hundreds of megabytes of RAM which is what the initial complaint was.

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

#226

Post by well_ackshually »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #214
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…

> 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.

DWM quite literally does that all the time. For the general case it allocates GPU memory, but also swaps to system RAM or uses it as a synchronization mechanic when you have one screen on an igpu and the other on a dgpu.

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

#227

Post by Joeri »

goalieca wrote: post #195
kvemkon wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

At one point I ran graphical linux on a 20 mb ram laptop although admittedly that was very tight.

I also remember running nt4 with photoshop, word, and my IDE (borland delphi) all at the same time and comfortably in 128 mb of ram.

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

#228

Post by mort96 »

mrob wrote: post #206
mort96 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly if the image is of the current weather it kinda does. I don't mind e.g Apple's weather app design at all

You probably have a SVG renderer in memory already, and you already have a frame buffer and/or compositor buffer(s). Why should adding a graphical representation of the weather require more than a few KiB?

Because a big picture looks pretty sometimes?

Not sure what you think "having an SVG renderer in memory" means exactly, typically the way an SVG renderer works is that you give it a huge chunk of memory and ask it to draw pixel data there from the SVG file. So even though the SVG is small on disk, rendering a 1000x1000 image from an SVG is gonna need a 1000x1000x3 byte pixel buffer (assuming no transparency or HDR shenanigans)

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

#229

Post by TitaRusell »

usea wrote: post #193
beloch wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I play videogames. As soon as it became technically feasible to patch games we began to see videogames come out with first day patches.

When you take away the constraints the slop emerges. You could not make mistakes in software when it was all printed on CDROMs and DVDs.

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

#230

Post by Scharkenberg »

fakwandi_priv wrote: post #169
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…

> According to Windows Latest, the high memory consumption is due to the fact that Weather is not a fully native Windows application. Instead, it is essentially an MSN Weather web app built on Microsoft's WebView2 framework. I wonder how this approach is having such an high reduction in memory usage compared to what’s stated in the article. I would assume both use the exact same WebView here. The only explanation her…

Yes, using an already-running Edge instance saves a bunch of memory. Also, this approach has the advantage of allowing all of your browser extensions to modify your Web-App experience. WebView2 doesn't relay Edge extensions.
Post reply on HN