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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

#241

Post by inigyou »

danudey wrote: post #237
torginus wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My Windows 98 install got ten times faster when I went from 32 MB of RAM to 48 MB of RAM. A fresh boot of my Windows 98 install at the time, once everything was loaded and settled, used up 27 MB of RAM, meaning that after 5 MB of allocations someone was getting paged out somewhere. That extra 16 MB made a world of difference. Do bear in mind, though, that we're dealing with a lot more than we were back then. Our hard…

Casey Muratori has complained about the hardware driver overhead, because it is possible for hardware to have standard interfaces without needing a device-specific software translation layer, especially for more basic modes (like framebuffer).

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

#243

Post by polyterative »

I am using AI to rewrite every proprietary driver/companion soft I had still running on my Mac system.I am using 5/10% of the original application's RAM.I am getting more features.My background RAM usage halved after converting many of them to my own versions.

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

#244

Post by odo1242 »

danpalmer wrote: post #205
lambdaone wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple weather is fully native from what I understand. I suspect the 250MB comes from the video backgrounds they play. Arguably that would be a reasonable thing to sacrifice on low memory systems, you'd barely notice.

I was able to do some tests with AI agent help and got:

- ~45 MB on buffers for animated backgrounds

- ~10 MB used for the Swift language runtime (runtime type information)

- ~44 MB used for system libraries: libSwiftCore, CoreFoundation, libobjc, Metal, VFX

- ~21 MB used on GPU buffers (GPU memory is also part of used system memory because of unified memory)

- ~6.3 MB for the weatherd daemon that actually collects the weather info and makes it available to the weather app and to widgets

- ~6.2 MB used for the display color pipeline (to handle color gamuts proprtly)

- ~7 MB runtime caches (shader compiler cache, libobjc cache, etc.)

- ~1-2 MB used for particle effects

- ~34-40 MB of memory as general heap memory that was otherwise unaccounted for (this seems to mostly be stack memory and threading-related stuff, and the actual application logic)

Overall the app is relatively optimized

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

#245

Post by mickelsen »

matteoraso wrote: post #208

RAM consumption has gotten crazy over the past couple of years. Consumers need to start calling software devs out for this, especially when there's such a severe shortage of RAM.

They could ask AI to refactor and debloat, since they can't be bothered with it because the incentives don't seem to align.

Last decade has been the worst, not even worth it for the eye candy like before.

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

#246

Post by kasabali »

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…

> 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.

You say tomato we say tomahto

At the end of the day bloated app is a bloated app its consequences are the same.

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

#247

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

thrance wrote: post #161
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?

The most lightweight solution I can think of is: curl wttr.in

That's basically my weather app. Though, I made it fancy at 7 lines of bash which takes location arguments and pipes into jq for display.

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

#248

Post by mort96 »

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.

What do you mean by "windows doesn't share both"? Windows doesn't get a say, Intel iGPU systems literally don't have video memory

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

#249

Post by kasabali »

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.

> ~300MB is perfectly acceptable if it works well, looks good and does what it should do.

No it isn't. It isn't a word process for gods sake. It has one literally one job and 300 MB is like an order of magnitude off for that. This mentalty is the slippery slope that led us to the situation in the OP today.

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

#250

Post by dualvariable »

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…

The weather app isn't a native app either:

> 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. Task Manager shows multiple Chromium-based subprocesses running simultaneously, which contributes to the unusually high RAM usage.

If you have Edge or Chrome open (or anything else that similarly uses Chromium) then the incremental increase in RAM usage from the Weather app is likely much smaller than the headline 1GB.

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