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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

#341

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.

These days we have an AI system to do exactly this kind of optimization, too expensive for humans, and too cheap compared to consuming expensive modern hardware

Can AI optimize? All signs point to it writing extensive amounts of unnecessary code

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

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 MB is ridiculously overbloated. 1 MB or something in that vicinity should be more like it.

`ansiweather` needs like ~6.28 MiB (measured with `/usr/bin/time -l` on OS X), but it's a bash script that invokes cURL, so there's certainly various overheads there too. One probably could get this down way below ~1 MiB with a properly tuned straight executable written in C (best not to use any of the "modern" stuff like Rust and Go, their default binary sizes for outputting "Hello, world!\n" are already extreme :-)…

On Linux you can bypass libc and use as little memory as you like. When you don't use libc and don't use dynamic loading there is no strict lower bound although you still start with a certain default stack size.

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

#343
post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Easy workaround for this Wipe Windows from your machine. Use Arch Linux. Problem solved.

I too want to shout how it's the Year of the Linux Desktop but I've been fighting mate-clock-applet recently. It has a memory leak, somewhere, and it slowly consumes RAM. Normally though it's ~65 MiB for both clock & weather. Also mate-screenshot is leaking RAM/processes. About ~40 MiB leaked per screenshot. These things do tend to get fixed over time, though.

Been using Gnome on Arch, it's been unbelievably stable

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

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you're reply hunting or we talk about different apps but how would you fit the Qt runtime, Javascript runtime, font cache, graphics, networking libraries, etc in this limit? This can't physically be under 70 MB, and more like 100-200+ MB.

Sibling comment called it: these are dynamic libs used by the desktop, so the incremental RAM usage is low. That's a good approach! Makes me wonder what the heck MS is doing to get their app to add an incremental gig to memory usage.

DLLs are hopefully shared. But when you run a JavaScript interpreter and load some JavaScript library, in several different processes, that is not shared. Each process gets an independent copy of the library because from the kernel's perspective it's data.

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

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 MB is ridiculously overbloated. 1 MB or something in that vicinity should be more like it.

Even 1MB is too much. I expect a modern weather app to be <20K.

You'll blow past that if you include any graphics at all.

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

#346

My gaming PC that I built in January 2006 that IIRC I used to simultaneously run Battlefield 2, Trillian, Xfire, Thunderbird, and Winamp with a 1680x1050 monitor had 1 GB of total system RAM.

I still miss Battlefield 2. There is really nothing like it today, not even close. The dynamics with squads and a commander and A+ physics and overall game balance remain unmatched for all FPS games. Fortnite, PUBG, COD, all are disgraceful in comparison.

I miss the squad gameplay of Battlefield 2 too. It hasn't been replicated since, in my opinion, and subsequent Battlefield titles changed the classes and made the available loadout options too flexible to require specialized play.

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

#347

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…

A better workaround is to install Linux. My entire operating system, which includes Niri window manager and Dank Linux running a weather app, among many other things takes less around 1 gig of ram.

Yes, switching operating systems is a reasonable alternative to switching weather apps

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

#349
post #228
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sh…

> 1000x1000x3

Cool, that's 3 MB

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

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4GB is completely fine in Windows 7.

Not to mention that on 32-bit without PAE, that was all you could get. Nothing more.

I thought you were limited to 3GB without PAE, since you needed at least 1 GB dedicated to memory-mapped I/O? I was never a PC guy though so I could be mistaken.
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