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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
That's also bloated, couldn't they find a better comparison to illustrate the egregious waste?
But yeah, I still remember when a weather app would take 10 MB and I was complaining (1999)
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.
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.
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.
Really Microsoft? Do you really need all the ads revenue from the weather app?
What’s next? Ads on the start menu?
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.
They already exist: https://www.howtogeek.com/windows-11-start-menu-ads-how-to-t...
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.
Or render everything using css, 100mb is someone not trying. 1gb is absurd abuse that only domestic violence victims put up with.
Back in my day 100MB was all you had for all your compute, and somehow programs still ran.
Things weren’t actually worse.
They "could" make it easy but why bother? I assume next update will make calculator 1 gb download, 2gb ram resident and ADS
https://web.archive.org/web/20010210023051/http://www.softse...
https://web.archive.org/web/20070210195451/http://www.locutu...
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!
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/scientist-say...
...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).
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.
Today 8GB is bare minimum.