What's worse is that the previous version of the same Weather app was fully native on Windows 10. Why would you take a perfectly working app and downgrade it like this?
Well, this is Microsoft and Windows; it would be weird if it got better.
Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
261–270 of 621 posts
Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
#262Earlier 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…
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Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows 98 SE kind of went overboard with the graphics (remember Active Desktop?), and a common screen size at the time was 1280x1024. But if you run modern stuff at 1080p (60% more pixels) or 720p ( fewer pixels), you're not going to see comparable memory use.
> and a common screen size at the time was 1280x1024 Maybe if you were really rich and only used high end desktops. A lot of the computers I used back then were still 800x600, fancier ones were 1024x768. If you happened to also have a 2D accelerator card you'd potentially have 1280x1024. And lots of apps purposefully ran at a much lower color depth, it was common for games to run at 8 or 16 bit color mode.
Early 90s maybe. By the end of the 90s and definitely early 2000s CRT screens were 1024×768 for the cheap crap and 1600×1200 for the high-end (with 1280×1024 as a mid-range).
Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
#264Earlier 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.
Sometimes, you have to realize Hacker News is full of nerds that care about stuff nobody else cares about. Looks are so fucking important for many normal people. There's people that decide for or against a phone simply because it comes in a fun color.
Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I remember playing The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall in the 1990s. It came on CD and was very buggy, and I would periodically call Bethesda and they would send me the newest patches on a floppy disk.
Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
#266Easy 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…
waiting for a quick simple straight forward tool on github that takes care of this... Anyone?
Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Thunar is very fast compared to Nautilus.
Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Windows Explorer crashes for me about ~3 times a day at work, and takes down the taskbar with it, so not sure about more stable. I don't use Nautilus though because it's pretty bare bones compared to Dolphin. Also:
> These super-indexed desktop linux search functions are also dog slow
Baloo-indexed KRunner on Plasma is instant. I index my entire home folder, including hidden files, and I can substring search with imperceptible latency. I can't speak to other search implementations, but yes KRunner + Baloo is much faster than grep.
Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
> 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 No it isn't good, and no it probably doesn't because it is kernel's job. I'd rather they don't do double caching, and it's actually worse if they do.
Syscalls are expensive. It's not double caching, it's layers of caching. The kernel caches inside kernel memory space, sure, but you still need a syscall to reach that. Every application has layers of caching, it's very normal. This isn't even the top layer of cache, because of course the CPU itself has multiple caches.
But, for example, in a web application you will commonly cache requests. But then the database also has a cache. And then the filesystem the database is on also has a cache.
Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
1MB is about the lowest memory usage you can get on Windows 7, because of reasonable tradeoffs made in the operating system to things like buffer and stack sizes. The OS creates a few threads for you, those threads have stacks and they didn't optimize the allocation size of those stacks - they used a currently reasonable default.
Depends on the app/framework but typically phantom threads don’t get started. Also, those stacks aren’t materialized until you write something - they’re all CoW’ed pages from a sentinel 0-filled page the kernel keeps around just for this purpose.
It's been a while, but I believe Windows initialises an internal thread pool & parallelises (some parts of) process start / module loading