My entire kde "plasmashell" which includes my wallpaper and the various widgets installed (including a weather widget) uses 560MB for a screen with 5120x1440 pixels.
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?
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.
Pictures and frame buffers. If you're running fullscreen at 4k, you're probably gonna take two roughly 3840x2160x3 byte frame buffers for the window. Your designers want a background image which moves as you scroll in some parallax style; that's over 3840x2160x3 bytes more for the pixel buffer backing the layer which stores the image. And let's say roughly 50% of your screen is text with subpixel (aka full color) anti aliasing; that means another 3840x2160x3x0.5 bytes for the pre rendered text.
3840x2160x3x3.5. That's 87MB, in pixel data only. And it's a very minimal example; for the parallax image, you're gonna want the image to be significantly taller than the window; you're gonna want a ton of smaller (tho still DPI) images for icons; a few different font atlases for different font faces you've loaded at once; maybe pre rendered pixel buffers for all sorts of UI components; etc.
And lord help you if your designers want any part of this to be animated.
(I'm playing a bit fast and loose with what lives on the GPU and what lives on the CPU here. On many systems, they share a memory pool anyway. But on systems with discrete GPUs, most of this is gonna be video memory, though applications may wanna store CPU-side copies as well for various reasons.)
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mostly rendering. A bunch of images, text, UI elements. On a modern high resolution display it adds up quite quickly. You can surely cut it down a bit, but 100MB isn't absurd.
If I full-screen it in high enough resolution it can be excused for using 100MB temporarily.
The window in the article wasn't very big. At most it would have about 10MB of framebuffer, and the images on display would fit into 1MB uncompressed.
We can't excuse typical program waste with screen sizes. Especially when you can switch to 1080p or 720p and watch them still use massive amounts of memory.
A weather widget using 8 bit color plus alpha on a 4k display show three full size images in 100mb. But I suspect that's not the ux we're talking about here, and a widget style system has no excuse.
Apple's Weather app has an animated background, glassy views, and nice animations like water droplets on the glassy views when it's raining. So rendering all that on a 4k or more display at 10bit depth is going to consume a bit of RAM. However I guess it can surely be improved to make it consume less RAM.
I think this depends on your location, because in some places you really want to view a radar map. "Rain in $CITY" is practically useless for me. Still, the (static?) map in the depicted app shouldn't take 1GB.
My favorite '90s weather app was WetSock. The installer was 1.5MB, though I don't recall the RAM usage. It showed a sunny/cloudy/etc. icon in the system tray, with the temperature in a tooltip:
Well it's comparing it to apple's weather app, which is a fair comparison I suppose. 100mb still sounds like at least an order of magnitude too high to me though.
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.
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.
No, because you have to manage communication between different teams on "how" and "what" about the single browser, much easier to let every team do their "best" without any external interference
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
...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?
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.
>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 years (2007) to 11 years (2015).
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.
> 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?
My entire kde "plasmashell" which includes my wallpaper and the various widgets installed (including a weather widget) uses 560MB for a screen with 5120x1440 pixels.
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.
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
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.
Pictures and frame buffers. If you're running fullscreen at 4k, you're probably gonna take two roughly 3840x2160x3 byte frame buffers for the window. Your designers want a background image which moves as you scroll in some parallax style; that's over 3840x2160x3 bytes more for the pixel buffer backing the layer which stores the image. And let's say roughly 50% of your screen is text with subpixel (aka full color) anti aliasing; that means another 3840x2160x3x0.5 bytes for the pre rendered text.
3840x2160x3x3.5. That's 87MB, in pixel data only. And it's a very minimal example; for the parallax image, you're gonna want the image to be significantly taller than the window; you're gonna want a ton of smaller (tho still DPI) images for icons; a few different font atlases for different font faces you've loaded at once; maybe pre rendered pixel buffers for all sorts of UI components; etc.
And lord help you if your designers want any part of this to be animated.
(I'm playing a bit fast and loose with what lives on the GPU and what lives on the CPU here. On many systems, they share a memory pool anyway. But on systems with discrete GPUs, most of this is gonna be video memory, though applications may wanna store CPU-side copies as well for various reasons.)
The visual assets alone will be tens of megabytes.
Why, though? You need some icons and some map imagery, not 4K texture maps
Should be able to get by with using system graphics
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> What’s next? Ads on the start menu?
They already exist: https://www.howtogeek.com/windows-11-start-menu-ads-how-to-t...
Don't they even had it earlyer and even let the DNS expire, so someone else could spam the startmenu?
They do. Never forget, Microsoft's goal is to squeeze as much money from you as possible.
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.
What is the weather app doing that it requires 100MB? For such a simple application, that seems excessive.
Mostly rendering. A bunch of images, text, UI elements. On a modern high resolution display it adds up quite quickly. You can surely cut it down a bit, but 100MB isn't absurd.
If I full-screen it in high enough resolution it can be excused for using 100MB temporarily.
The window in the article wasn't very big. At most it would have about 10MB of framebuffer, and the images on display would fit into 1MB uncompressed.
We can't excuse typical program waste with screen sizes. Especially when you can switch to 1080p or 720p and watch them still use massive amounts of memory.
A weather widget using 8 bit color plus alpha on a 4k display show three full size images in 100mb. But I suspect that's not the ux we're talking about here, and a widget style system has no excuse.
Apple's Weather app has an animated background, glassy views, and nice animations like water droplets on the glassy views when it's raining. So rendering all that on a 4k or more display at 10bit depth is going to consume a bit of RAM. However I guess it can surely be improved to make it consume less RAM.
https://wttr.in/ shows it's very possible.
Vector icons. It can be fit under 50MBs.
Use an svg.
Or render everything using css, 100mb is someone not trying. 1gb is absurd abuse that only domestic violence victims put up with.
Quite a tasteless metaphor, no?
I think this depends on your location, because in some places you really want to view a radar map. "Rain in $CITY" is practically useless for me. Still, the (static?) map in the depicted app shouldn't take 1GB.
This has strong "How much could a banana cost? 10 dollars?" vibes.
Back in my day 100MB was all you had for all your compute, and somehow programs still ran.
Back in my days, I had to remove the mouse driver from autoexec so that microprose grand pirx had 600kb of ram to start
Had to get a ride to drive floppies with corrected config.sys and autoexec.bat files around to friends.
Things weren’t actually worse.
When RAM was $100 per MB that would be $10,000. You can do a weather app in much less provided you use native code.
LumiWeather for AmigaOS runs on 2 MB RAM.
ESP32 in my OpenSprinkler pulls the weather (among a few more things it does) just fine and it has 520 kilobytes or RAM total.
Windows really I'd shitty for "assuming" unlimited ram, storage, processing, internet budget for them to get away with it.
They "could" make it easy but why bother? I assume next update will make calculator 1 gb download, 2gb ram resident and ADS
My favorite '90s weather app was WetSock. The installer was 1.5MB, though I don't recall the RAM usage. It showed a sunny/cloudy/etc. icon in the system tray, with the temperature in a tooltip:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010210023051/http://www.softse...
https://web.archive.org/web/20070210195451/http://www.locutu...
You don't need anything more than https://wttr.in/ even with all the fancy terminal graphics.
I am pretty sure xfce4 weather plugin takes a lot less.
Well it's comparing it to apple's weather app, which is a fair comparison I suppose. 100mb still sounds like at least an order of magnitude too high to me though.
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.
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.
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?
No, because you have to manage communication between different teams on "how" and "what" about the single browser, much easier to let every team do their "best" without any external interference
At some point you just got to be amazed at it and celebrate.
The Weather app in Windows is more ads than weather, so it checks out.
How much does rainmeter take? I used to load tons of widgets on it in my old laptop. Ahh those were the days
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
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.
Thanks, React and friends.
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
...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!
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...
Nobody would like to use DDR3 right now though, you can get cheap DDR3 DDR2 if you want some
>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 years (2007) to 11 years (2015).
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.
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.
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.
Sure, but I don't really think that accounts for the increase in memory usage.
15 years ago 4GB was comfortable and 8GB was abundant.
Today 8GB is bare minimum.
I'm sure the memory pages compress well /s