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

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.

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 components. It may be that the 662 MB used by the "Renderer" is shared between many Windows components, so killing that Weather app may not reclaim as much space as you may hope, instead, it would require killing every user of the component, some may be core system apps.

In addition to the distinction between private and shared memory, there is also the distinction between actual RAM usage and and virtual memory. It is possible for a process to memory map a 100 GB file. If you look at the address space, it will take 100 GB more of virtual memory, even though it may be actually zero physical RAM, but it is not always zero either, the parts of the file that are currently accessed take up some space, which may later be reclaimed by the OS by committing the page to disk.

Even the most obvious "I do a big malloc()" kind of memory use is not that obvious, the OS can overcommit, put stuff into swap, use memory compression, etc... And it can do that even if the system is not overloaded, as to make more space for the disk cache for instance.

So seeing "1 GB" in the task manager is just a vague hint of how it may affect performance. And not all "task manager" tools give the same value for the same program (so Windows vs Mac may be misleading). "Process Explorer", a more advanced version of the Windows task manager can give a lot more details, with different values of memory usage depending on what you are looking at.

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 block from the built-in Weather icon.

(Also, go into Widget settings and turn off "Discover / Microsoft Start feed". Same crap, different surface. Get rid of it.)

In Windows group there used to be a review where you had to tell the board why the module you try to merge into main branch moved the baseline up by 100KiB.

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 ?

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?

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.

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?

It will be interesting to see whether OS and application developers start to face commercial pressure to debloat their applications.

For operating systems and their bundled applications, Apple's integration is an advantage here; the OS designers work for the hardware company and have aligned incentives. That doesn't mean they necessarily align with their customers, just that they are internally aligned.

Microsoft...do they even care about the snappiness of Windows desktops any more?

> 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?

What's worse is that the previous version of the same Weather app was fully native on Windows 10. Why would you take a perfectly working app and downgrade it like this?

Windows 11 is what made me switch back to dual booting, after 4 years being content with WSL. Everything is slow, everything's GUIs have two versions and it nags endlessly for a "Windows Account".

After seeing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49226923 show up here, I'm now hoping someone will vibe-code a nearly identical-looking native app that takes a few orders of magnitude less RAM.

Personally I just use my government's website when I need to check the forecast.

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?

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.

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

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.

The only good thing that might come out of these extreme memory shortages is forcing careless developers to actually care about resources for once.

Why does everything turn into a browser

Shame, because it's genuinely a great map - ahem, optimizations aside.

I remember giving the app a second chance - after assuming it to be bloatware next to all the other default apps that came with Windows - but after seeing it redeem itself in benchmarks[1], I gave it a shot and quite like it. The iOS app was too rubbish to bother with, though.

I'm curious what could options there are for decent predictions. Especially with Dark Sky never having been much of an option for Europe. I see some of the people behind it have a new subscription-based iOS app to try, though: https://acmeweather.com/app.

Do people have any desktop weather apps that strike a nice balance between decent code and actually useful predictions? Future weather's likely to be anything but boring, unfortunately.

[1]: https://forecastwatch.com/awards/2026/

I don't want to "akshually" this, but on a stock[1] up-to-date Windows 11 x64 25H2 (aka: my desktop) Weather takes up around ~670MB of RAM at launch, not 1GB. While writing this comment it dropped to 450MB. All in all much lower than 1GB.

1: i.e.: not "debloated" or running a bunch of random customizer scripts.

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.

RAM consumption has gotten crazy over the past couple of years. Consumers need to start calling software devs out for this, especially when there's such a severe shortage of RAM.

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

Is Chris Titus's tool able to remove the built-in Weather app (I haven't had a Windows machine with admin right for too long to remember that)? If yes, do we see 1 more GB of RAM free after running that tool?

This is what happens when you start a separate instance of Chromium everywhere.

I am using AI to rewrite every proprietary driver/companion soft I had still running on my Mac system.I am using 5/10% of the original application's RAM.I am getting more features.My background RAM usage halved after converting many of them to my own versions.

Why does Windows 10 use 10GB of RAM if you have a total of 32GB?

And how come you cannot pretend to only have 4GB to make it use less?

I don't care about how slow the OS becomes, I care about software not crashing.

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.

I seriously wonder if the recent migrations between languages mande by major projects leveraging SOTA LLMs have started a new trend of a) making native apps more common, as opposed to Electron and stuff b) will help to optimize existing apps and remove the bloat.

The alternative is, of course, that most apps will end up being bloated even more specifically because of how we'll slowly transition into developing using LLMs only.

For comparison, the GNOME Weather app takes 80MB.

The memory isn't even the worst part, on my laptop it takes up to 30% of the 8 core 4 GHZ CPU. Anytime I'm browsing and my fans start blowing like a lawnmower, it's because I forgot to close my weather app and it's just blasting away at the processor. Doing what, I don't know... probably spyware in one of the insurance ads on the side?

Attention Hacker News: you are literally the people writing this code and these frameworks.

Get your shit together and be the change you want to see. Or stop whining.

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

Thanks, React and friends.

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

"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.

i used WKWebView highlightr wrapper around highlight.js for syntax highlighting on iOS, and the webview was the biggest memory line in the app

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.

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

Microslop strikes again

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

What if we make all these apps obsolete with < 1mb options.

100 tools < 100mb.

...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!

In the era of coding with frontier LLMs, it should take Microsoft 20 junior engineers, a couple seniors, a token budget and a month or two to fix most of this shit by building lean, native apps. Given that they can obviously spare this kind of resourcing, I truly wonder why they won't. Not that I give a crap - removed the last windows machine from my home ages ago at this point.