Windows 11 Weather App Devours Over a Gigabyte of RAM

Microsoft's Weather app on Windows 11 has been found to consume an excessive amount of RAM, eating up around 1.2 GB of memory for a simple weather check.

This is roughly five times what Apple's macOS Weather app requires for the same task, which uses about 246.7 MB of RAM.

The reason behind this high memory consumption lies in the fact that the Weather app is built on Microsoft's WebView2 framework, essentially a website rendered through browser technology.

Task Manager revealed nine separate Chromium subprocesses running under the Weather app, including a renderer and GPU process, contributing to its massive memory usage.

The bulk of the memory consumption comes from the browser engine powering the app, rather than the weather data itself.

MSN branding on the app explains the presence of ads within the interface, which is not expected given that Windows 11 is not a free operating system.

Users running PCs with 8 GB or more of RAM may experience tangible problems due to the Weather app's memory appetite, including slowdowns and the need for Windows 11 to use SSD as temporary overflow storage.