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

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 because it allocates fast enough, the extra headroom is needed.

Even if it isn't the case that the GC is universal, having a shared GC amongst runtimes would be a boon in general. If I have 3 JVMs running, I might give them all 1gb of memory even though really each of them only needs 200mb to get their job done. The extra headroom is for when a burst happens. If I could combine all 3 into 1, I could save a lot of allocation overhead and general memory.

This does sort of exist in java (war deployments), but there are limitations that make it unappealing. For example, each of the JVMs have to be the same version.

> 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 wonder if this is a fair calculation including the fact that multiple WebView apps should be sharing the same libraries in memory.

If you pay 0.5-1GB to load the edge/chromium libraries but that memory is amortized over N different apps the user is likely to run, then the ”1GB for the weather app” is an unlikely worst case.

My gaming PC 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.

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 option.

And it also ads on it.

Really Microsoft? Do you really need all the ads revenue from the weather app?

What’s next? Ads on the start menu?

Yesterday I was running : NixOS, mango window manager, 5 instances of ghostty, 2 of those running fresh terminal editor, firefox with 5 tabs and I was at 2.37gb of RAM.

This article seems to be underestimating how much RAM a weather app should take. A well thought-out, native Weather app wouldn't take more than 100 mb of RAM.

Please, Microsoft, PLEASE ! You can do BETTER ! Stop acting like an internship for every single feature you add ! Where's the money going ?

It's just msn weather page. Can't they use one single browser for all their apps instead of one per app?

An app which could have been a website.

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

Anything above 50MB RAM for this is shameful imo and reflect poor engineering.

At some point you just got to be amazed at it and celebrate.

Apple Weather app can jump to 1GB on a mac if you click around a little with the wind gust direction particle effect in the map

How much does rainmeter take? I used to load tons of widgets on it in my old laptop. Ahh those were the days

The Weather app in Windows is more ads than weather, so it checks out.

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.

"Windows users are fundamentally willing to put up with more bullshit than MacOS or Linux users."

I read this circa 2010 and it stuck with me ever since. Also, have felt this way over the years, when I see Windows users work.

PC games were the last reason why I still used windows. Now that Proton works wonders in Linux, I hope I don’t need to ever come back again. Great times with 98, xp and win7 that were snappy, easy to install and with no slop

The complete works of Shakespeare are about 6MiB. I hate that 100MiB is considered efficient for telling me if it's going to rain later.

...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 that Electron used gigabytes of memory, because on modern PCs memory was plentiful anyway. Well, it's not plentiful anymore! Maybe it's time software developers actually used resources efficiently?

Hey, you even have an LLM to help you now!

Thanks, React and friends.

I'm sure the memory pages compress well /s