5 ms·
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.
by iamcoder18 2mo ago
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.
- lousken 2mo agoI am pretty sure xfce4 weather plugin takes a lot less.
- Throwthrowbob 2mo agoLooks like about 30 MiB with a quick test.
- lousken 2mo agoAnd that includes gtk3 bloat I am assuming, gtk2 would be even better. But 30MB for a weather app sounds acceptable to me.
- karmakurtisaani 2mo agoThis 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.
- big85 2mo agoLumiWeather for AmigaOS runs on 2 MB RAM.
- drdaeman 2mo agoESP32 in my OpenSprinkler pulls the weather (among a few more things it does) just fine and it has 520 kilobytes or RAM total.
- 2Gkashmiri 2mo agoWindows 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
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- kevin_thibedeau 2mo agoWhen RAM was $100 per MB that would be $10,000. You can do a weather app in much less provided you use native code.
- whynotmaybe 2mo agoBack in my days, I had to remove the mouse driver from autoexec so that microprose grand pirx had 600kb of ram to start
- SV_BubbleTime 2mo agoHad to get a ride to drive floppies with corrected config.sys and autoexec.bat files around to friends. Things weren’t actually worse.
- iinnPP 2mo agoPersonally, I have reverted back to sneakernet in a lot of what I do.
- baal80spam 2mo agoGood times.
- keicwifjwud 2mo ago> Back in my day Back in my day systems used to be a lot simpler too. These “back in my mind” comparisons show a clear lack of understanding of the subject matter. 1996 apps are not the same as 2026 apps. Expectations are different. Design languages are different. Even the UX is entirely different. 1GB is clearly overkill, no question. But ~100MB to ~300MB is perfectly reasonable and you know it.
- vinyl7 2mo ago99% of apps have the same or less functionality today as they did in 2001, but are significantly slower and worse.
- chrisandchris 2mo agoFunctionality isn't everything. A human teller has the (more or less) same functionality as online banking, but I do love me some online banking. I also like the weather icons being 4K and having some smooth anmiations. Not to say that it's gone worse (it has IMHO) but comparing 25 years ago to know doesn't help much. Times were different back then. That's like comparing 1900 travel to today.
- karmakurtisaani 2mo agoYeah I wrote it a bit tongue in cheek, but even then I can't help but wondering where is all that memory needed. My best guess is the GUI is somehow really heavy, wouldn't expect a simple console program that connects to some weather API to require that much RAM. But I never worked on apps like this, so no clear idea.
- e2le 2mo agoWhat is the weather app doing that it requires 100MB? For such a simple application, that seems excessive.
- kevincox 2mo agoMostly 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.
- charleslmunger 2mo agoA 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.
- satvikpendem 2mo agohttps://wttr.in/ https://wttr.in/ shows it's very possible.
- kalleboo 2mo agoThe display on that page is literally broken for me, the boxes are all misaligned. It seems like it can't handle Japanese text correctly. Properly working localization in dozens of languages is one of those things that adds "bloat" to modern software that was missing in the bad old days.
- satvikpendem 2mo agoUnicode doesn't require 100s of megs.
- galad87 2mo agoApple'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.
- p1mrx 2mo agoMy 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.softseek.com/Education_and_Science/Weather/Review_4251_index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20010210023051/http://www.softse... https://web.archive.org/web/20070210195451/http://www.locutuscodeware.com/wetsock_ss.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20070210195451/http://www.locutu...
- satvikpendem 2mo agoYou don't need anything more than https://wttr.in/ https://wttr.in/ even with all the fancy terminal graphics.
- cissikatt 2mo agoWhy would I like to know the weather in some other city?
- satvikpendem 2mo agoWhat do you mean? It gets the weather for your city via your IP address, maybe you're on a VPN.
- Narishma 2mo agoYour IP address doesn't automatically correspond to your city, even without a VPN.
- satvikpendem 2mo agoThen add your city as an argument to the curl. It works well enough regardless and doesn't use hundreds of megabytes of RAM which is what the initial complaint was.
- OvermindDL1 2mo agoThat's a pretty crappy way to detect it seems, it thinks I'm in some city almost a thousand miles away, no VPN, purely direct connection,...
- blooalien 2mo agoThey also have a nice API where you can pull the raw weather data and fancy it up any way you like graphically. Great for building your own entirely custom weather widget for your desktop, webpage, app, or whatever. :)
- benj111 2mo agoWell 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.