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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

#61

Post by znpy »

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…

It can, but you have to know what you’re doing and you have to know it very well.

Looking at the opposite extreme, the guy that originally wrote the windows task manager (the thing that popped put when you pressed ctrl+alt+canc) posted a video about cloning the windows basic text editor in a 3kb binary: https://youtu.be/OG91c7xsNMc

Needless to say, the guy knows what he’s doing.

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

#62

Post by samrus »

mort96 wrote: post #57
iAMkenough wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a weather app, you should be able to get by with a couple base vectors you modify based on conditions.

On disk yeah, sure. But you're gonna render them into a pixel buffer which lives in memory.

How did applications do it before? Like in the 90s or 00s

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

#63

Post by adrian_b »

gruez wrote: post #44
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's literally not cheaper than it was ~15 years ago? Right now RAM is the same price per GB as it was in 2007 and prices per GB look to continue to rise. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/scientist-say...

>Right now RAM is the same price per GB as it was in 2007 and prices per GB look to continue to rise. ...when looking at nominal prices (ie. not adjusted for inflation). If you adjust for that the furthest back you can go to get that price is 2011. What's more is that because RAM prices are subject to boom and bust cycles, that price has also been reached in 2015. So just by tweaking two parameters we went from 19 ye…

That is correct, DDR5 today is in real US$ slightly cheaper than DRAM was in 2011, 15 years ago.

For more than 15 years in the past, the price in real US$ of DRAM per GB was always higher than today.

During 2014, there was a brief price peak when DDR3 (the standard current then) was slightly more expensive than DDR5 is today.

Still, the fact that now the price per GB is the same as 15 years ago, is bad enough, and it can still become worse.

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

#64

Post by dasyud »

SlightlyLeftPad wrote: post #28
mort96 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft absolutely doesn't need it, but I'm guessing the weather app team (or the core filler apps team or whatever team is responsible for it) needs it to juice a metric to make some middle manager happy. And it makes the middle manager happy because it lets that middle manager report better numbers to their superiors again. Etc. It's why all large dysfunctional organisations do self destructive stuff like this.

“What value are you bringing to the company?” translates to “if you’re not printing money, you lose your job.”

I once worked on a project where the goal was to improve the reliability of MS Teams. The skip level manager was not happy when we said we cannot estimate what the revenue gain would be because it can't be measured.

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

#65

Post by nicoburns »

samrus wrote: post #62
mort96 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On disk yeah, sure. But you're gonna render them into a pixel buffer which lives in memory.

How did applications do it before? Like in the 90s or 00s

They had fewer graphics, and much lower resolution screens.

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

#68

Post by Dylan16807 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #13

...you know, I keep reading all this stuff about memory prices, and it does suck, but memory is still much cheaper per gigabyte than it was ~15 years ago. Which matters because the things most consumers are doing on their computers haven't changed in the past 15 years. We browse the web, edit photos, message friends, and so on. AI generally runs on remote servers anyway. For years, everyone kept saying it was fine th…

We had modern programming toolkits that traded some efficiency for ease of use 20 years ago, along with GPU compositing for maximum smoothness. And that's when Vista came out requiring a whole 1GB to run properly. And other than doubling for 64GB that didn't change through 7, 8, 8.1, 10.

Electron was never a great idea but more and more basic things keep moving to it and the result is a disaster. When you use it for several little things at once it turns from annoying waste into massive waste.

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

#69

Post by mort96 »

samrus wrote: post #62
mort96 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On disk yeah, sure. But you're gonna render them into a pixel buffer which lives in memory.

How did applications do it before? Like in the 90s or 00s

WAY lower resolution screens so pixel and frame buffers were a tiny fraction of the size, non-composited graphical environments which meant there was one fewer frame buffer per window, and a visual style which typically emphasized large pictures/animations less.

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

#70

Post by doikor »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #43
trzy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The visual assets alone will be tens of megabytes.

Do all visual aspects of a weather app need to be loaded at once? Is the cost penalty loading a hundred kilobytes per image from disk really unacceptable?

Even if the app is no longer using that memory it is not released until Windows thinks another app needs it.
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