Windows 11 Weather App Devours a Gigabyte of RAM

The Windows 11 Weather app consumes more than a gigabyte of RAM and serves third party adverts, making Microsoft's own default software an unlikely symbol of what remains wrong with the operating system.

Testing found the app climbing past 1.2GB of system memory, roughly five times what the equivalent Weather app on macOS uses.

The cause sits behind the interface, where Weather runs as a web app spinning up eight separate Chromium processes instead of a lightweight native program.

Alongside the forecast, side panels display full adverts for products like shoes and medical insurance, pulled from the MSN network rather than limited to Microsoft's own nudges toward OneDrive.

The timing lands badly, arriving as a memory price crisis pushes manufacturers back toward 8GB laptops where a single app claiming a gigabyte hurts most.

Microsoft has promised broad performance improvements and less upselling in Windows 11, and stripping the ads out of a basic system app would be an easy place to start.

An independent retest confirms the finding and maps its edges: past 1GB at launch, about 500MB idling in the background, peaks near 1.2GB between tabs, How-To Geek measures. The process tree carries nine entries, not eight, because the forecast is the MSN Weather website rendered inside WebView2, against Apple’s 246.7MB native equivalent, 9to5Windows counts. Memory prices have spiked just as Microsoft spends months promising smoother Windows 11 on 8GB machines. It committed in March to native inbox apps under Rudy Huyn and already rebuilt Calculator, Camera and six others, leaving Weather a holdout. Until a rebuild ships, swapping in a native client such as Lively Weather, which draws about 170MB, is the working remedy.