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Comment by glimshe | Hacker News Reader

10MB to tell me the weather from a remote server...

Let's remember that the sprawling world of Legend of Zelda SNES (a Link to the Past), including all graphics, music, code and dialogue was 1MB.

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1MB is about the lowest memory usage you can get on Windows 7, because of reasonable tradeoffs made in the operating system to things like buffer and stack sizes. The OS creates a few threads for you, those threads have stacks and they didn't optimize the allocation size of those stacks - they used a currently reasonable default.

Depends on the app/framework but typically phantom threads don’t get started. Also, those stacks aren’t materialized until you write something - they’re all CoW’ed pages from a sentinel 0-filled page the kernel keeps around just for this purpose.

The stacks are allocated gradually, but there's a minimum few committed pages for each thread and there can be a lot of threads. The graphics driver alone will typically spawn a thread per CPU core unless you specifically disable threading optimizations, and that's separate from the thread pool.

It's been a while, but I believe Windows initialises an internal thread pool & parallelises (some parts of) process start / module loading

You’re right. I hadn’t realized that Windows creates a hidden thread pool under the hood for parallelized DLL loading.

What else might that weather app be doing to justify the memory footprint? MS might suck at memory efficiency, but you can't claim they'd ever miss an opportunity to monetize their users. How can a weather app make MS money? MS has asked themselves this, so maybe we should too.

You're right that it's a matter of incentives, but it's because of cost not revenue.

It's bloated not because of a sneaky plan to include revenue generation. It's cheaper to make it bloated because quality is costly. They can externalize costs to users and nobody cares.

I play videogames. As soon as it became technically feasible to patch games we began to see videogames come out with first day patches.

When you take away the constraints the slop emerges. You could not make mistakes in software when it was all printed on CDROMs and DVDs.

I remember playing The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall in the 1990s. It came on CD and was very buggy, and I would periodically call Bethesda and they would send me the newest patches on a floppy disk.

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