"Rising cost of memory," Microsoft explains why Windows 11 will use less RAM
Pavan Davuluri says the rising cost of memory is why Windows 11 will use less RAM, with work on the memory manager, WinUI 3 and WebView2.
https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/10/04/rising-cost-of-memory-microsoft-explains-why-windows-11-will-use-less-ram/Open linkView original on piefed.ca
96 replies
For the whole system, or just the spyware part?
Yes.
All part of the goal of turning personal computing into cable TV by making everything web app SASS.
Great now remove the motherfucking tracking ID
Linux: You guys have tracking IDs?
Which one? Or, like, all of them? Naaaah.
Or maybe create GUIs without a webbrowser underneath again? Or are your students not capable of anything but web tech?
I recently had to configure an older Thinkpad X1 Carbon G8 for my little brother. It's only got 8GB of RAM unfortunately and he needs Windows.
So I installed Windows 11 IoT LTSC like I usually do, installed all necessary drivers and manually deactivated services that don't need to run. It still uses 3GB of RAM while idling.
My 2-year-old daily driver Manjaro install uses half of that, and that's on a system with 32GB RAM where Windows would almost certainly use more just because there's more
Win 10 LTSC, Tiny10 or Tiny11 no good for your brother's use case? I haven't kept up with the Tiny cooks but IIRC Tiny 10 used a comically small amount of ram.
I haven't looked at Tiny10/11 in a long while actually. I remember it not really working that well, although maybe it still was in beta back then.
10 is EOL, so I wouldn't use it anymore tbh
10 still receives free updates, LTSC will have support for some time after and IOT I think until 2030.
But Debian will work in a fucking toaster for the next forever, so there's that.
IoT is supported until 2032
The thing is those are just security updates, most software will work for the time being, but it only been a year and some newer DX12 games already having issues with 10 unfortunately.
Some devs in the big corpos got spoiled with so much memory, with feature creep they managed to bloat up once reliable programs.
In 1994 and when I began compsci, I remember how memory and bandwidth conservation was then taken so seriously, where performance was a high consideration over eyecandy (at the time, PCs were still 386s, 486s and some Pentiums coming out, and most I used had either 1mb or 4mb of memory available). That I once got hold of Creating Killer Websites (yeah, that book), which included a section on how to slim down images to make them download faster, as at the time nearly everyone were on dialup. Videogames were then equally small, they were mostly sprite-based and were easily fit into a CDROM, as other games had basic vector graphics and low-resolution texturing.
It's wild reading about the old game systems, like Atari, and all the tricks and techniques they used to cram data and code into small amounts of memory.
Yeah any time you hear devs saying “developer productivity “ you can associate the software they produce with higher ram usage, larger footprint, slower and doesn’t work unless your internet is fast.
I'm looking at you, lemmy sidebar header images that don't get scaled down after uploading and are often > 5 Mb.
8GB of RAM: the gift that keeps on giving. In 2005, you were basically running a supercomputer. By 2015, you were... still doing fine, honestly. Fast forward to 2025 and your machine is wheezing like it just climbed five flights of stairs while Chrome is open. But wait—2026 rolls around and suddenly 8GB is back to being acceptable again because everyone finally realized Electron apps were a mistake and went back to native development. Just kidding, we're all doomed. Your IDE alone needs 12GB now.
All it took was a RAM apocalypse for Microsoft ro consider improving performance in Windows. I'm seeing brand new laptops on display being sold as Windows 11 PCs with 4GB of RAM.
It's hard for the younger generation to understand, but 4 Gb of RAM is MORE than enough for 99% of tasks if your software isn't written by lazy idiots.
Heh. I have a core 2 duo (Compaq CQ45, circa 2010) with 4gb running Zorin Lite OS. For 99.99% for every day tasks (and then some) it runs excellently, with about 600-800mb in reserve before caching. We're talking YouTube, LibreOffice, multiple Firefox tabs, GIMP...all it needed was a cheap ssd to replace the spinning rust.
For context: this thing struggles to run Half Life 2 at any sort of reasonable speeds (though that's an iGPU issue to be fair).
Last glance this laptop costs $20AUD to purchase off eBay.
When the Raspberry Pi 3 first came out I was shocked how much it could do with less than a gigabyte of RAM (it technically has one gig but it shares it with the GPU). Linux is ridiculously lean when packaged right.
I have an Android tablet with four gigabytes of RAM that sometimes crashes running Firefox with multiple tabs, something the Pi somehow managed with a fraction the resources. Windows often struggled with eight gigabytes before I upgraded.
I put Retropie on mine, the pi3b I think w/wifi, only emu that had issues that I wanted to use was the N64, everything else was butter
WinXP ran quite nicely on 4GB of RAM. You could boot to the desktop in under 5 seconds if you had a solid state drive.
All the day to day tasks someone needs to do with their computers haven't materially changed in the last twenty years since XP held the crown. In that time the speed of processors, storage, gpus, and ram has increased by literal orders of magnitude.
And yet, somehow, things have become much shittier since then.
Can confirm that worked well into the Win8.1 era.
Because what used to be a native application that used 200 mb of RAM now needs to be a web application built on top of a browser using 4 gb of RAM to do the exact same task.
I will honest to God pick fucking Eclipse over VS Code every single day, because at least it runs natively.
I've been using Geany, was that a bad choice in hindsight?
My xp laptop came with 512MB of ram. I'm pretty sure 256MB was typical.
For real, OP must have been rich. I ran Windows 7 on 1 GB well enough. It got slow eventually but I used it until 2016.
What do you mean every app is not supposed to be a dressed up web browser?
Yeah, I wish current devs would understand that I didn't buy a shitload of ram for them to waste it. I bought it so I could have a shitload of things running at the same time. I currently have like 6 applications running and I'm using 20gb of ram ffs.
And they wish you to understand that you should be prepared to pay more for better optimised software, but you're not. If it takes significantly more time AND more experienced devs to build native applications versus webview based, the cost of building native might be as much as 5x more, but you can't raise the price and you won't get any additional sales, because people may complain, but nobody would pay extra for better performance.
Is there some option where I can pay for an optimized version of Firefox? I certainly haven't seen it. What about windows itself?
Nobody minded keeping things tight before ram got cheap but it's suddenly a problem now that it's expensive again?
I still remember having a 4gb of ram on win7, and it's enough for day to day tasks. The only thing that prompt me to upgrade to 8gb is games. It's not too far ago MS recommend 16gb as a baseline for win11.
4GB should be plenty for any general computing. I used to run Minecraft servers on under 1GB of system memory for an entire school classroom. It worked pretty well back then too.
My friend bought one of those, paired with I think 64gb of EMMC storage which is basically an SD card. It couldn't browse the internet really with Edge in it's default settings. I had to disable so much crap but I got it usable with Firefox.
It would probably run best with that really stripped down version of ChromeOS
Nah, with 4gb you can get away with most linux distros with XFCE, and you could even do some indie gaming. Plus, using ChromeOS means you're expected to have a network connection at all times (which makes things like using office suites locally a pain).
I've ran Puppy Linux off a 8gb flash drive on a system w/ 2 gigs of ram. It was by no means good, but it worked good enough.
Depends on CPU, would love to have access to hardware like this to play with to see what it runs. But I don't want to buy it without trying it first.
$20 for a Compaq CQ45 or slightly newer on eBay....throw in a small SSD.
See my comments above as to what you can run with it. TL;DR a surprising amount
You mean Flex?
🤣 jfc
I have a stick Pc and a windows tablet that run Windows 10. They definitely don't fly, but media playing and light browsing (no more than 3 tabs), work. With 4gb they'd be comfortable. One has been converted to Antix and the thing works decently. Installing W10 with 2gb and 32 Gb disk was a bitch though (they came with W8)
When the VP Windows Platform is telling things like that, it's time to let it die already...
[ ] Source
Sure, I'm going to start running my containers using WSL. Who knows what kind of wonderful surprises are in store in the network layer? How the environment parameter passing will be somewhat more brittle with funky new ways to break because of new characters you have to escape? I can't wait to troubleshoot all of that, and spend countless hours on MS forums and meet fellow colleagues with similar issues. What fun.
You forgot the bot reply on the ms forum closing the issue 4 years ago because "there was no interest" in the conversation. Closed = no need to fix surely.
dude, windows uses paging even if it has a free bank of memory to use...i've seen it with my own eyes...it's a complete trash OS...swaps like nobody's business
If you've eg. a system service that allocated a whole pile of memory on startup, but hasn't read or wrote it since, then copying it to swap during idle disk time is a good thing. If it does get used, then it's still in RAM, and if memory pressure increases, then you can reuse it immediately because it's already on disk, don't have to wait to swap it out. You could give this functionality a catchy name like 'swappiness' so you could fine-tune how aggressively it's done by setting the value in a file, too.
Doesn't stop Windows being a trash OS, of course, but if I've allocated swap then I want it to be used for best system performance.
My Windows 2000 machine had 512MB of RAM. With it I could browse the web, run full-featured word processors, scan images, edit images, play 3D games, edit / compile / debug C and C++ programs, and so on.
If memory serves, my office machine about that time only had 128MB of RAM. It was slower, but it could do just about all of that stuff, too.
I'm not sure there are any broad categories of tasks I use computers for today that I wasn't already using my Windows 2000 machine for back in 2001 or so.
It's hard to fathom where all the RAM in modern systems goes. A million somethings is a lot. A million bytes is a huge amount of information. War And Peace is under four million characters.
I literally just now disabled hiberfil.sys on Windows (it's basically useless tbh) and reclaimed 30 fucking GB of space.
powercfg /h off
30GB.
WTAF.
Hibernation was useful when people shut down their machines (like, actually shut down, not sleep) and getting any process started was a slow ordeal. Nowadays you don't really turn your computer off anyway. Windows doesn't by default, at least. Newer laptops often don't even support real sleep, you're expected to keep them running 24/7.
Exactly. And it was gobbling up 30 gigabytes / is switched on by default.
#JustMicrosoftThings
My first win95 machine had 32MB, win98SE had 128MB, win2k had 512MB, and winXP had 8GB, my win11 has 128GB.
This is why it is (often) so important that a new generation takes over. They haven't experienced this as we did. They mostly don't know.
So every new generation is a new opportunity to pull off this shit.
https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-tries-to-install-movie-maker
This was in my feed today. 23 years old. Nothing improved. But sure, windows will use less ram 😹
„We bought all the RAM and will rent it back to you later.“ -„AI“ companies
i got my windows install down to 0 RAM by using Linux.
Blindly deleting windows partitions while installing Linux because you know with 100% certainty that there is nothing of value on them always feels good.
i used to work in IT and I would explain to people the only documents or files of any value are the ones they themselves generate, because that means they are unique. Also the first rule of infosec is redundancy.
Until you find out that your favourite software has gone obscure and the single uploaded to internet archive is missing a disc.
Lots of c:\program files out there with some cool shit in them.
Unused storage is wasted storage.
Bullshit, Windows 11 uses more ram than any other OS I know of. It idles an entire gigabyte higher than Windows 10, it's still worse than MacOS although close, and it's nowhere close to Linux Gnome, Headless, or even KDE Plasma.
I can guarantee that windows 11 will use zero gb on all my devices
Yes, Windows 11 uses a lot of memory now. The point is that they're working on making it use less.
doubt
Oh it may well be true, doesn't mean they will succeed.
Yes I understood that but I am arguing against the implication they made when they chose this specific language and connotation, so I am insinuating that it will still use more than every other OS unless they gutt all the adware and spyware.
Useless
Ftfy 🤣
Their first step should have been to disable all the data collection and „AI“. If they were actually serious about saving resources.
Unused ram is wasted ram.
RAM that's hogged by windows is wasted RAM. It should be used by programs and for caching.
Technically, it is being used by about 30 more background processes than Windows 10 had.
“unused ram is wasted ram” is only valid when that memory is buffer/cache. Except the windows UI isn’t allocating excessive buffers or cache that can be freed under memory pressure or when an application needs it. It’s allocating actual memory pages for the JS rendering engine and other bloated vibecoded services.
Not when your system just booted and is idle.
A cynic would say that customers disabling Copilot is finally what forced Microsoft's hand.
I disable every single new feature from all non Foss vendors. Theyre ALWAYS shit. 99% of the time its a shitty ui change for no reason and now shitty ai thats useless for no reason.
Whatever happened to good software. They all went to Foss lol
Publicly traded company shareholders, baby!
Any project worth its salt is privately held or FOSS lol
That's why Valve/Steam holds the line. People think public corporations can choose not to be evil; they legally can, but it's practically impossible. That's why we need strong government and regulation.
Hang on, how many surface pro owners are trying to run a local model i.e. local LLM on 8GB ram? I've got 32gb ram and it struggles with most larger models
Smaller models, probably.
https://tokencalculator.com/tools/llm-ram-calculator
Sure, but how many people who actually know how to install a local LLM are using it on a laptop with 8GB ram? I guess if they have an NPU it might help
It's not just the Windows OS that uses more RAM than others. Every bloody App these days left memory optimisation in the dust a long time ago.
The base OS itself is only a fraction of the issue
Depends on how much ram you have. 32 or more? Yeah the OS is a drop in the bucket. But even with 8Gb windows kinda chugs sometimes.
I think a lot of that depends on platform though. If you're having electron apps like Discord active on your desktop the whole time, memory usage will be a constant issue for you.
I replaced a lot of my proprietary software with FOSS suites that run locally (with the exception of Steam and GOG launchers that I don't have running in the background), and I haven't had any issues with memory since.
Plus, using Ublock Origin on a Firefox fork tends to prevent junk from loading in the first place while browsing the web (and saves a shit ton of ram)
Haven’t we seen this movie from Microsoft before ?
Let’s put out some press releases and then do nothing. It will be old news soon and no one will notice
Ah, my mistake, i missread. It "will" use less memory (like, maybe one day).
I'll believe it when I see it. I mean, Windows has a lot of auto-loading bloatware that Microsoft could cut, but I really doubt they'll actually have the balls to cut any of it.
If the average laptop people can afford can't run windows, windows is going to change that. Because their entire business model.is being the default.
Add in all the bloat from HP and Dell too. It's pretty bad.
Them working to improve the OS is like the good side effect of them investing into AI causing this whole dilemma.
It's still time to abandon Windows though.
Was it because Win11 had a bunch of slopcoded Copilot bs? Inquiring minds want to know.
Bet. Some other group will just eat it up
It seems like these assholes have a reason & a retort for everything these days...