The native Weather app in Windows 11 is recording RAM usage that reaches peaks of between 1.5 GB and 1.6 GB during normal use. According to data collected by Windows Latest, the app requires a high amount of resources to perform basic weather checks. This figure is significant, as Microsoft itself has started a plan to reduce the amount of space used by the operating system on computers with 8 GB of RAM.
The data shows that memory usage immediately rises to 1 GB when the app is opened. After the initial loading, usage settles at an average of 600 MB when the interface is completely idle, while 500 MB is the lowest figure recorded at rest. However, things change when the user directly interacts with the app. Actions such as zooming in on maps or moving between locations cause resource usage to keep increasing until it reaches 1.5 GB or 1.6 GB of allocated memory.
Windows 11 Weather App RAM Usage Spikes to 1.6 GB
The high resource usage of a secondary app especially affects computers with 8 GB or 16 GB of RAM. When the operating system runs out of available physical memory, Windows uses the SSD paging file to temporarily store data. This swapping process causes slowdowns in the overall performance of the computer, which can be difficult to identify for users without technical knowledge.
For comparison, the native Weather app in Apple‘s macOS uses less than 250 MB of RAM while running. The reason for the difference in Windows 11 is that its Weather app is not a standalone program. Instead, it works as an interface that loads web content, widgets, and advertisements from the MSN network.
To prevent this component from affecting performance on computers with limited memory, users can change its behavior through the system settings. The quickest option is to disable the Weather app from running in the background through the installed apps section. Windows 11 also allows users to completely uninstall the app if they prefer not to use it and want to free up memory on their computer.
