WhatsApp for Windows is a slow, RAM-hungry web wrapper. With Microsoft committed to WinUI, there's no excuse not to build a native app.
  • CanIFishHere@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    30 minutes ago

    I don’t know who is doing the testing, but they don’t know what they’re doing. 313MB

  • Dave.@aussie.zoneEnglish
    131·
    2 hours ago

    No, the worst app is Windows 11. My parents have some all-in-one HP PC. It has some Intel laptop processor from about 8 years ago, 16GB of ram, (upgraded from 8), and a wheezy 256GB spinning drive, running Win10 adequately.

    After being bombarded with “upgrade to Windows 11! It’s easy and fun!!” notifications, they did so, and of course their PC is woefully underpowered for the job.

    I log in remotely and check what’s running and the OS is paging to the swap file constantly. I had to get a de-bloat script and turn off about 50 Microsoft “essential services”. The biggest hog out of them all was copilot, which was using about 4GB while sitting there idle.

    I have no doubt that I’m going to have to run that script every month as everything gets “repaired”, until I can get back to their place and put a SSD in and maybe install some flavour of Linux.

    • saltesc@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 hour ago

      I had to get a de-bloat script and turn off about 50 Microsoft “essential services”

      And then a Windows Update comes along…

    • feannag@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      1 hour ago

      My MILs computer has 8 GB of RAM… I have not yet convinced her she needs a new computer, but I did just install windows 10 iot ltsc on it so it will at least get security patches.

  • qupada@fedia.io
    261·
    3 hours ago

    Without having read the article, lemme guess… Electron.

    Maybe now that no-one can afford RAM these companies might get motivated to do something about that. Hell, I’d accept them just feeling shamed into not being the worst memory hog on your system at this point, over any altruistic reason.

    See also: Discord and Slack, two other colossal wastes of space that use an order of magnitude more RAM than a native app would while running slower and providing absolutely zero other benefits.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
      7·
      1 hour ago

      The worst part about electron is that there is no way for it to share resources like a browser. You have to oacjage the whole version together, when really should should have been more like a pwa. Instead you have 10 electron instances, running with 10x the respurce needs.

      • Crit@lemmy.wtfEnglish
        1·
        47 minutes ago

        that’s why you just skip the middleman and run it in your browser instead.

    • gemakey@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      2 hours ago

      They don’t care if you can’t afford it. Data centers are buying them by the truckload.

    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
      51·
      2 hours ago

      “Stop using meta people!” sounds like a protest chant for the second-class citizens of a B-grade cyberpunk dystopia.

  • Da Cap’n@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    51·
    3 hours ago

    Where you fucked up is installing and using WhatsApp to begin with. It’s been shit since meta bought it.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    41·
    3 hours ago

    As long as you have paging space — and you almost certainly do — in general, an OS should page out pages of memory used by software that isn’t being frequently used.

    It’s possible that the program is allocating memory and then keeps hammering it to keep it resident, but most of the time, a program allocating more memory than it absolutely requires isn’t honestly that big a deal, because the OS will handle it reasonably and just leave it in the pagefile.

    I don’t know what the mechanism is to report this on Windows, but you might try looking in mmc (Windows-R mmc Enter), if that’s still a thing in Windows 11, as it has a bunch of process resource usage graphs.

    On Linux, you’ll probably want to be looking at RSS to find what’s actually in physical memory (well, there can be shared memory and some other things, but RSS is probably a reasonably approximation). You can see this in top.

    searches

    If this is current, Windows probably calls it “Working Set”.