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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

#71

Post by zapkyeskrill »

loehnsberg wrote: post #56
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?

I built a weather app for myself fetching ECMWF ensemble forecasts for my home location. Running the service is 60mb plus data 39mb and another 2mb for the spaghetti charts showing temperature, clouds, precip, wind over 10 days. What do I need to do to fill the other 900mb?

Run those things as an electron app? Add on analytics, location tracking and data exfil and you'll be fairly close

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

#73

Post by blackhaz »

nashashmi wrote: post #29
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?

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)

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

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

#74

Post by Wowfunhappy »

hinkley wrote: post #52
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…

But we went from 1080p monitors to 5k monitors and so we are pushing 7x the number of pixels and at roughly twice the bits per pixel.

True, but I don't really think that accounts for the increase in memory usage.

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

#75

Post by mort96 »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #58
SlightlyLeftPad wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Any manager who doesn't push back when given a perverse incentive should be fired. They are not leaders, they are followers... And not even very good followers.

Yet they're the ones who get promoted because their KPIs are the best.

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

#76

Post by Dylan16807 »

nicoburns wrote: post #65
samrus wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They had fewer graphics, and much lower resolution screens.

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.

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

#77

Post by mort96 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #76
nicoburns wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had fewer graphics, and much lower resolution screens.

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.

Windows 98 wasn't composited, which makes a huge difference.

And to be clear, there's a ton of unnecessary bloat today as well. It's just that even a lean and mean highly hand optimized native app is gonna be way bigger today than it was then, due to compositing, higher resolution assets, higher resolution screens and different design sensibilities. But most apps aren't lean and mean highly hand optimized native apps so.

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

#78

Post by hyperhello »

benj111 wrote: post #38
hyperhello wrote: post #10

I would like to be assured that the author knows the difference between actual memory and setting aside paging space.

That still isn't a good look.

I’m not sure if you mean a good look for the process or for the author but paging space is just saying “gimme a gigabyte” like saying “gimme a plate” is at a barbecue. The resources themselves aren’t being used at that point.

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

#79

Post by david-gpu »

blackhaz wrote: post #73
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)

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

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.

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

#80

Post by TacticalCoder »

All the comments excusing the RAM usage "because high-resolution screens require pixels" are missing the fact that there's this thing called GPU memory. Which is where pixels data should be. There's no way you need to store fullscreen 4K images for a weather app on anything else than the GPU: use scalable icons, render them on the GPU. No need to use actual RAM: the GPUs have had their own RAM since times immemorial and GPU rendering is a thing too.
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