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Comment by asdfasgasdgasdg | Hacker News Reader

Very few users care about how much RAM their media player uses. The practical difference between 370MB and 100MB is basically nil for any normal workload. It affects nothing but how many unlikely-to-be-used files fit in the page cache.

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A problem in isolation this is not, however. Large portions of Windows now have this same bloat in terms of executable filesize, runtime needed for basic functions, and RAM usage. Windows Media Player by itself might not be an issue, but it's part of a trend that now affects Explorer, Desktop Window Manager, and a bunch of other core components to the operating system.

Have you heard that there's a RAM shortage?

Do you have telemetry about how often systems are overcommitted due to Windows Media Player memory usage? I'll bet Microsoft does.

Do you have telemetry about how often systems are overcommitted due to Windows Media Player memory usage? I'll bet Microsoft does.

Considering the way Microsoft's product line is these days, I have a hard time believing its terabytes of "telemetry" go anywhere but the Windows equivalent of /dev/null.

I'd bet the kind of people who care about the RAM usage of their media player haven't used Windows Media Player in a decade and disable as much telemetry as they can.

And Microsoft has incentive to force users to upgrade because their computers need more RAM, disk, and CPU

Now multiply that opinion by every application on your computer. Including the start bar and notepad.exe.

There's a special case argument to be made in favor of ignoring media player resource consumption, given the maximum number of ears and eyes per human.

I expect there's someone out there who tiles 10 instances of simultaneously playing audio/visual media, but that's not most of us.

Computers can execute multiple different programs at the same time, so users are able to run a media player while their main focus is on a different window, tile, monitor or whatever else.

Given that 8GB machines are still widely in use (and will get even more common over the next years), 250MB of extra RAM use is a pretty huge portion of user's available RAM pool, so this is quite a big change.

I normally don't have notepad.exe or the windows media player open, so it's irrelevant. Chrome, clangd, rustc, etc. are all that matter. Optimizing anything else fails the pareto principle. I definitely do not want Microsoft paying its engineers to optimize windows media player memory usage.

I don’t want a trillion dollar investment in ram reduction, but the fist 80% of optimisation will be trivially achieved. Microsoft have a conflict of interest given they also sell surface devices where pushing people to the more expensive models is beneficial, while also probably benefiting when other hardware manufacturers benefit too.

If all apps are developed with the same mindset, all of them would consume much more memory. Does the average user have a 3x buffer just in case? I doubt the median-ish 8GB is enough these days.

> Very few users care about how much RAM their media player uses

Famous last words.

The price of RAM skyrocketed in the last months. The users will care.

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