Windows 11’s built-in Weather app can reportedly consume more than 1GB of RAM while doing little more than displaying a forecast.
Tests published by Windows Latest found that the Weather app could exceed 1.2GB of memory usage during normal use, without any particularly demanding interaction. Wccftech saw similar behaviour.
Specifically, RAM consumption started at around 1GB and fell to roughly 500–600MB while idle. Moreover, it climbed as high as 1.5–1.6GB during basic actions such as zooming and navigating around the app.
That could be particularly noticeable on PCs with limited memory. On an 8GB Windows 11 machine, the Weather app alone could therefore consume close to 20% of the system’s available RAM. This could potentially leave less memory for other applications.
For comparison, Apple’s native Weather app on macOS reportedly uses less than 250MB of RAM under similar conditions. That puts Microsoft’s implementation at roughly five times the memory footprint, according to the reported testing.
The likely reason is that Windows 11’s Weather app isn’t really a traditional native Windows application. Windows Latest reports that it’s essentially an MSN Weather web app running through Microsoft’s WebView2 framework. Task Manager consequently shows multiple Chromium-based processes running in the background. This helps explain why checking the weather can require so much memory.
The problem is less significant on machines with 32GB of RAM or more, where an extra gigabyte is unlikely to make much difference. On systems with 8GB or 16GB, however, the additional memory pressure could cause Windows to rely more heavily on the page file. This could potentially affect responsiveness.
The excessive memory usage is particularly awkward given Microsoft’s ongoing efforts to make Windows 11 more efficient, especially on lower-end hardware. Moreover, Microsoft has also indicated that it wants more of its applications to become fully native Windows experiences.
For now, though, the Weather app appears to be a particularly obvious example of how turning a relatively simple utility into a web-based application can come with a surprisingly large memory cost.
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