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gigel82yesterday at 3:57 PM3 repliesview on HN

Until you look at memory consumption in Task Manager or Process Explorer. WebView2 spawns ~400Mb worth of various browser processes. Your main app process by itself might look nice and slim, but all that (somewhat hidden) cost is atrocious.


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canucker2016yesterday at 5:54 PM

Microsoft Schedule+ was Microsoft's workgroup calendaring app before the Office division merged email and calendar into one app.

Outlook was late so Schedule+ was included in Office 95 for the Win95 release and so Schedule+ got a wider retail consumer release than if it had been just included with the Microsoft Exchange Server 4.0 release.

from https://www.reddit.com/r/software/comments/v73bk7/microsoft_...

  I've been using Schedule+ 95 to keep track of my daily activities since forever. I even modified my Windows install to keep it fully compatible after WinHlp32 was nixed in Windows 10. However, it is increasingly showing its age, and there are certain aspects where I would prefer a more modern solution; I can't integrate Sched+ with my smart phone easily ...

  I'm explicitly NOT looking for any cloud or web apps. I don't have reliable internet nor are all of my daily use machines fast enough to reliably, and responsively, display 90% of the bloated webapps out there. I want something lean, fast, and native for the desktop. Schedule+ uses a max of about 7MB of RAM and I don't want to go over 10-20.

7MB RAM is a lot when Win95 was designed for a 80386 with 4MB RAM. But a modern day x86 (okay, x64) with 8GB, that's about 0.1% of total RAM.
mike_hearntoday at 8:36 AM

Which doesn't make a whole lot of sense because you can run all the Chrome components in-process, and in this case WebView2 is rendering trusted code written by Microsoft that isn't going to try and exploit the renderer (HTML email is very limited, doesn't support JS at all).

Processes in Windows are very expensive objects. They could probably reduce the overhead by allowing more customization of the Chrome codebase for this. Mojo abstractions service location.

throw10920yesterday at 7:26 PM

I have 16 GB of RAM on my laptop, and I'm told that's relatively little nowadays. Even after the OS's 2 GB cut, I can run 35 applications that use 400 MB each. I don't even have 35 applications that I care about. (and I'm certainly not going to want to run more than, say, three email clients)

RAM usage at that scale might not be desirable, but any engineer knows that it's the result of a tradeoff where the other options take longer to develop. I would rather have an application that uses 400 MB now than a slimmer one in several years, or one that uses less memory but is extremely slow in some corporate environments (like older Outlook).

(please don't respond to quibble about the napkin math)

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