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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

#361

Post by SirMaster »

WarmWash wrote: post #331
josephg wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us still know how to write software like that. And enjoy doing it. I made a little conference schedule app a few weeks ago for a conference I was at. I used my own rust UI toolkit, which calls in to cocoa to make use of native UI components. The resulting binary is about 500kb and it uses a couple megs of ram while running. It looks and feels like a totally native iOS app. As far as the OS is concerned, it is…

AI writes code like that, but people get pretty upset hearing it. The program that I use to manage my small business, basically a GUI wrapper on an sql DB is a total delight to use, because everything happens instantly . Even opening it is instantaneous. Modern software is such a bloated mess that you kind of get used to a 20 second start-up and a .25-1 second delay on every action. Then you use something that isn't…

What happens if you keep asking AI to rewrite it to use less and less resources?

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

#362

Post by vel0city »

derac wrote: post #143
nashashmi wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s an equivalent app to make a comparison with, one from an OS company. But yeah, I still remember when a weather app would take 10 MB and I was complaining (1999)

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.

Not trying to excuse the Windows app's memory usage, but these are vastly different apps. Your app is nice, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't have anywhere near the same number of features as the default weather app. In some ways that's a pro for the Windows weather app (animated radar, easy to pan around in the radar view, extra map modes, lots of graphical elements to the presentation), in some ways yours is better (ad-free, for example).

Don't get me wrong, I imagine one could get close to the same featureset while using FWIW, while your compiled binary is 233kB, when its running its using 2.5-4.5MB.

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

#363

Post by asdfman123 »

mrheosuper wrote: post #321

As embedded guy, sometime i wonder what those web devs are doing. A simple app that consumes multiple magnitude more RAM than the entire system i usually working with(~1MB). I assume it just does some HTTP query and render it on the screen, why the heck 1GB of RAM ?

There's a bunch of other requirements you need to meet and no one cares about RAM consumption. So you do it the most time efficient way, not the most memory efficient.

Before you scorn, doing it the opposite way, taking more to use less memory, makes you less promotable, not more.

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

#364

Post by nophunphil »

charcircuit wrote: post #360
s3p wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MV3 is severely limited in what it can do. One example that blew my mind is that chrome happily renders webpages immediately after application launch, while extensions are still loading. Firefox, in contrast, doesn't let the network request fire off to the page until every extension is ready. So chrome is essentially screwing over the user, letting ads/ blocked content load, and intentionally degrading their experien…

>MV3 is severely limited in what it can do. Yet, I never see ads since ad blockers still have enough power to block ads.

“If I can’t see it, it must not be there”

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

#366

Post by charcircuit »

nophunphil wrote: post #364
charcircuit wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>MV3 is severely limited in what it can do. Yet, I never see ads since ad blockers still have enough power to block ads.

“If I can’t see it, it must not be there”

That's the point of an adblocker. Web pages have ads, but with the extension they aren't there.

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

#367

Post by stronglikedan »

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…

The weather app itself and the framework it runs on are the same thing when talking about resource usage.

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

#368

Post by zapzupnz »

im3w1l wrote: post #311
ed_mercer wrote: post #292

They're pointing to macOS and saying it uses 5 times less RAM there, but is 230MB for a weather app really something to be proud off?

The thing with ram is that once you can fit everything you want into the space you have available there is little benefit in optimizing further or getting more space. 1gig -> 230MB may be a large enough reduction that it goes from "too big" to "small enough".

2025 and 2026 have proven that to be vastly untrue. It was never true. If it was anything, it was rampant laziness.

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

#369

Post by LPisGood »

SirMaster wrote: post #361
WarmWash wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI writes code like that, but people get pretty upset hearing it. The program that I use to manage my small business, basically a GUI wrapper on an sql DB is a total delight to use, because everything happens instantly . Even opening it is instantaneous. Modern software is such a bloated mess that you kind of get used to a 20 second start-up and a .25-1 second delay on every action. Then you use something that isn't…

What happens if you keep asking AI to rewrite it to use less and less resources?

It’s actually pretty good at this if you have some very specific constraints and objective.

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

#370

Post by xkriva11 »

pjmlp wrote: post #124
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…

Which is what OSes implemented in system languages with automatic memory management usually do, it is an OS service. Oberon example, https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/ProjectOberon/Sources/Kerne... Active Oberon example, https://github.com/btreut/a2/blob/master/source/GarbageColle... Bare metal Java, Go, .NET, Erlang, OCaml,... with bare metal deployments naturally have the runtime take the OS role.

Smalltalk: https://github.com/pavel-krivanek/BarePharo
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