this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2026
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207
WhatsApp is the worst app on your Windows 11 PC right now, eating 1.2GB of RAM doing nothing (www.windowslatest.com)
submitted 8 hours ago by uszo165@futurology.today to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] Jyek@sh.itjust.works 8 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

This person fundamentally misunderstands RAM on Windows...

Apps reserve a portion of the total available memory. That memory is not necessarily in use. Memory not in use will still be available to other applications as soon as the system reallocates it when a given application needs more. Usually of you have more RAM, applications will reserve more of it. You can check a better explanation of your current memory usage in the windows resource monitor. You'll see memory allocated, memory in use, and memory being used to cache data (which windows does to reduce disk reads and writes), as well as memory completely unallocated. Chrome can easily allocate 1/3 of your total available memory by the third tab, but that doesn't mean chrome is actually using that much.

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 hours ago

I mean it's an electron app. Maybe the number is inflated, but it's still a ton. The previous number he compared to (100mb) would be equally inflated, so it's fair

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 22 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (2 children)

Wouldn't Windows 11 be the worst app on your Windows 11 PC? 🤔

[–] SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 1 points 15 minutes ago

It's probably just teams, right?

[–] P1nkman@lemmy.world 6 points 5 hours ago

Technically.... Yes.

[–] CanIFishHere@lemmy.ca 11 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (2 children)

I don't know who is doing the testing, but they don't know what they're doing. 313MB

[–] unitedwithme@lemmy.today 1 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

Why Edge? (Still Chrome)

Why Claude?

WhatsApp depends on how much TEAM your PC has and what other software is running in order to change its cache. Maybe the tester/author has a lot of RAM and saw this "huge" usage.

Personally, if I bought 64GB of RAM, by god I'm going to use it!! Why buy lots of RAM and be stingy??

[–] 0oWow@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago

Just because you have RAM to give, doesn't mean an app should use it. An app that is using way more than it typically uses often means the app has lost control in some way (a memory leak). An app that has lost control will usually have performance or other issues.

[–] CanIFishHere@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 hours ago

It's something I've always done. I pick an app. ie: Firefox but then at some point I'll go to the alternative to see if it has something I might have missed. This way I can evaluate it myself rather than rely on someone else's bias. I've been using Edge for about 3 months now, and it really isn't that bad. I'm going to try Brave next.

I don't know what that means. How much TEAM my PC has? You saw what Edge was using. This PC, which basically is a boy doing a man's job, has 32GB of RAM. It runs all of my 'ARR' apps.

I just don't see the issue with Whatsapp. It runs perfectly fine of my crappy HP I7 7700 PC.

[–] nexttech@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

Look at mr moneybags over here

[–] CanIFishHere@lemmy.ca 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

The screenshot is from my $300 HP Elite Desk 4. It doesn't support Win11, but I installed it anyway.

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

You cannot fish in lemmy as it's a website. Thank you for your understanding.

[–] CanIFishHere@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 hours ago

Can I at least get my bait back?

[–] jaschen306@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 hours ago

Fable is so expensive. I made a Blinko notes desktop app on Opencode last night using Minimax M3 and it would have cost me 3000usd if I was using Fable.

[–] actionjbone@sh.itjust.works 89 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Counterpoint: no, it's not, because I'm not stupid enough to install it.

[–] KingKong33@lemmy.ml 32 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Or own a Windows PC!

[–] actionjbone@sh.itjust.works 3 points 6 hours ago

Sadly, I have one that I need for some freelance work. But I don't use it too much.

[–] ChojinDSL@discuss.tchncs.de 55 points 8 hours ago

Oh, it's most likely doing something. Just nothing you would want.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 18 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 13 minutes ago) (6 children)

No, the worst app is Windows 11. My parents have some all-in-one HP PC. It has some Intel laptop processor from about 8 years ago, 16GB of ram, (upgraded from 8), and a wheezy 256GB spinning drive, running Win10 adequately.

After being bombarded with "upgrade to Windows 11! It's easy and fun!!" notifications, they did so, and of course their PC is woefully underpowered for the job.

I log in remotely and check what's running and the OS is paging to the swap file constantly. [Edit: and I mean, to the point where opening an application takes 60 seconds of disk thrashing for a window to appear]

I had to get a de-bloat script and turn off about 50 Microsoft "essential services". The biggest hog out of them all was copilot, which was using about 4GB while sitting there idle.

I have no doubt that I'm going to have to run that script every month as everything gets "repaired", until I can get back to their place and put a SSD in and maybe install some flavour of Linux.

[–] lechekaflan@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago

Install Linux, Problem Solved.

[–] feannag@sh.itjust.works 5 points 6 hours ago

My MILs computer has 8 GB of RAM... I have not yet convinced her she needs a new computer, but I did just install windows 10 iot ltsc on it so it will at least get security patches.

[–] saltesc@lemmy.world 5 points 6 hours ago

I had to get a de-bloat script and turn off about 50 Microsoft "essential services"

And then a Windows Update comes along...

[–] CanIFishHere@lemmy.ca 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

If you put in an ssd, Windows should run just fine.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, it's on the to-do list. I still don't like it endlessly paging though. I also hate Microsoft's push to get everyone on win11 even if their PC's will run like asthmatic slugs.

[–] CanIFishHere@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 hours ago

I have found every single PC of mine has benefitted from running Win11. Even those that don't meet the criteria. It's a solid OS.

[–] WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 2 points 6 hours ago

put that script in task scheduler on repeat. let it run every day

[–] Simon_Shitewood@lemmy.ml 1 points 5 hours ago

If they were happy with 10 give them Mint, they won't even notice if you skin it.

[–] qupada@fedia.io 27 points 8 hours ago (3 children)

Without having read the article, lemme guess... Electron.

Maybe now that no-one can afford RAM these companies might get motivated to do something about that. Hell, I'd accept them just feeling shamed into not being the worst memory hog on your system at this point, over any altruistic reason.

See also: Discord and Slack, two other colossal wastes of space that use an order of magnitude more RAM than a native app would while running slower and providing absolutely zero other benefits.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 8 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

The worst part about electron is that there is no way for it to share resources like a browser. You have to oacjage the whole version together, when really should should have been more like a pwa. Instead you have 10 electron instances, running with 10x the respurce needs.

[–] Crit@lemmy.wtf 4 points 5 hours ago

that's why you just skip the middleman and run it in your browser instead.

[–] carotte@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

my friend has 16gb of ram and he keeps hitting out-of-memory errors when he has like 5 apps open, because they’re all electron and they all take like 2gb each, it’s ridiculous

[–] CanIFishHere@lemmy.ca 0 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Your friend has disabled the swap file. Never a good idea.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

To be honest I'd rather get OOM errors in my consumer OS than endless disk thrashing. At least mechanical drives were more resilient and you could hear the thrashing, as opposed to silent massive wear on your SSDs.

[–] CanIFishHere@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 hours ago

I run 32GB and I still run a swapfile. My ssd is still going after 3 years, but everything dies.

[–] gemakey@lemmy.world 5 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

They don't care if you can't afford it. Data centers are buying them by the truckload.

[–] Beacon@fedia.io 2 points 6 hours ago

OP was talking about the software companies, not the ram companies

[–] NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 16 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

Why would anyone put WhatsApp on their computer?

Stop using meta people!

[–] carotte@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

unfortunately switching away from messengers like this is much harder than other stuff cuz you have to move your entire social network over. it can be done, but unless all your friends and family are also foss and privacy nerds it’s going to be difficult

then again idk if it’s possible, but if it is, you should at least use whatsapp within a web browser. it may even consume less ram that way lol

[–] NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 3 points 4 hours ago

It isn't hard to make that move though it's just inconvenient. I wouldn't play along, friends and family can fuck right off if they wont leave. It's directly funding so many nasty things I can't be part of it.

[–] TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 9 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

"Stop using meta people!" sounds like a protest chant for the second-class citizens of a B-grade cyberpunk dystopia.

[–] morto@piefed.social 3 points 3 hours ago

but we are second-class citizens in a B-grade cyberpunk dystopia...

[–] xSikes@feddit.online 4 points 6 hours ago

Or they’re mining your data….?

[–] rainbowbunny@slrpnk.net 3 points 5 hours ago

I have a Windows 11 PC with WhatsApp?

[–] psycocan@lemmy.ml 6 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

It's most definitely doing alot

[–] KingKong33@lemmy.ml 4 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

The doing alot gets a lot done.

[–] actionjbone@sh.itjust.works 1 points 6 hours ago

Alot of Doing is a very productive alot.

[–] Captainautism@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

Where you fucked up is installing and using WhatsApp to begin with. It’s been shit since meta bought it.

[–] KingKong33@lemmy.ml 4 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

And Windows.

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[–] blarth@thelemmy.club 3 points 7 hours ago

I can’t imagine using anything under Meta’s control for personal communication.

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