2w ago

Preloading File Explorer in Windows 11 Doubles RAM Usage, Offers Minimal Speed Boost

www.techpowerup.com TechPowerUp

45 comments

This is one area where I will agree with MS. 32 MB extra RAM consumption is worth it for even a moderate speed boost.
That being said, the vast majority of modern applications run like shit. You have electron apps which are comically terrible in their performance metrics, but even beyond that you often have apps takeing up 100s of MBs and eating up a stupid amount of RAM considering what they do.
- Yea the damn start menu is an electron app now. Ffs where did we go wrong?
- It might be one of those placebo feelings, but I think my PC is running slightly worse and I'm working on a video right now I need to edit with Premiere so I'm thinking of formatting my PC, I haven't done so in many years.
  
  I mean, Premiere is known to be a buggy mess. I have no idea why companies still force people to use it when Resolve exists. Good luck to you sir.
  
  If you are not forced to use premiere then use Davinci resolve and if you think it's good and still worried about performance you might want to try Linux. Though you should do it only if not satisfied with your current system
  
  If you reformat, look into 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC. massgrave.dev
- I also agree, but ... it's an attitude that gets you in trouble fast and it only works once. Throwing hardware at a problem never works for very long, and hardly ever gets you the order of magnitude increases that reevaluated algorithms and data structures will get you. No amount of hardware gets you past an O(n^2) for long.
- Making desktop applications has become a nightmare in anything but C or C# and that isn't exactly a language people really want to be programming in these days. That is a big part of the problem there aren't good GUI bindings for a lot of languages and most programmers nowadays have been building websites and working with GUI APIs is a huge step back.
  Everyone is preferring server/web solutions now as its easier to charge customers for it and keep it up to date and the knock on consequence is desktop app support isn't great or considered important.

What the headline doesn't say: It tested nearly double as slow as Windows 10's File Explorer with this RAM usage increase.
Windows is getting worse. Not better.
- I'll never understand why file explorers are so resource intensive and so slow. they're getting a list of file names, maybe pulling a thumbnail from cache. they don't need to read the metadata of every file in the folder you're looking at, certainly not before displaying a list of files.
  macos finder is even worse. i am often pausing for multiple seconds at the "file -> open" dialog
  I would like to use a file explorer which tries to be as lightweight as "ls -lF"
  
  Microsoft: "What was that? You want CoPilot integrated so it can search through your files for data mining.....I mean helping you find stuff?"
- What the headline doesn't say either: just use Linux already as that just works
  Yes, I'm that guy, sorry, not sorry
  
  As a fellow Linux enjoyer: Yup

You know what would really solve this issue?
That's right! Adding AI (read: LLM) to it!

It's crazy to me that I'm recommending 32GB RAM systems to everyone now because I regularly get alerts for a good chunk of machines that hit close to 16GB usage.
My Linux desktop boots so fast and I can't tell ya how much ram on boot but I'm pretty sure it's still less than 2GB 😂
Windows is like 6 or 7 easy.
- 32 is bare bones for Windows nowadays! You actually need it. I'm at 10 GB just running nothing with Windows, not even starting a game. Omg and I thought fast boot, was faster until I went to Linux. I also feel like Windows somehow made my motherboard boot slower as well.
  Windows has enough money to make it's DE experience better but they don't care out it's end user.
  
  They only care about siphoning our data and advertising to us. And vibe coding apparently. Such a buggy pos these days.
- On Linux I've found it tends to be
  1-2GB console onle, or very basic GUI 4GB desktop manager GUI 8GB+ GUI and modern tabbed web browsers (they're memory hogs). Some games 16GB+ Many games from Steam etc
- High memory usage isn't a problem by itself. Empty RAM is not being used. How the system performs when something needs RAM is more important.
  My system has 96GB of ram, 24 of which is dedicated to a Windows VM. Right now, I have only 3.5Gb free because of everything I'm running.
  The important thing is, if I run a new task that requires more RAM, my system will cleanly reallocate the RAM to where it's needed with no latency or performance hits, or stuttering.
  In the meantime, it's not sitting there, unused and useless.
  When I had Windows on this same system, with less RAM, it performed worse when it needed to swap in RAM.
  
  High memory usage isn't a problem by itself.
  The issue is when it's used inefficiently or for useless purposes. An unoptimized application takes 500MB of extra memory and that is 500MB that cannot be used for read/write caching nor another application, and 500MB closer to an OOM situation.
  In theory, an application can suffer from issues of underutilization of memory, just as one that over-utilizes memory. In practice, I find that lower-than-expected memory use is a much more positive indicator of an optimization-focused project than one that uses more memory than expected.
  In the meantime, it's not sitting there, unused and useless.
  If your system uses caching, then "usused" memory may not be so. Memory used for caching is also cleanly "Available" for use if needed. This is not the case with the 500MB of extra memory a process might decide to capture. Of course this is complicated further with swap (I wouldn't use it).
  
  Well it is a problem when it's consistently getting close then I get tickets that computers are performing poorly shortly after. You're on the cusp of page thrashing if you're high on usage.
  Your use case is not a typical one either, compared to what I'm dealing with. It sounds like maybe you have a few heavy hitters, but when you're constantly switching between MS office, web pages, and CAD and things like that it becomes very noticeable. If a machine has 15.6GB used out of 16GB, a single web page could trigger some thrashing.
  For example, I regularly saw Palo Alto panorama use around 1GB for just the single web page 😅
- My Debian server without an DE takes about 900MB on boot
- The IoT edition of Windows 11 runs in 4GB ram and performs ok. I don't recommend more ram, I recommend either Linux or LTSC IoT.
  
  Ya that would not be a sustainable option in my case unfortunately.

They should just rollback to windows xp and patch the security issues. It happily ran on 128MB of ram.
- But how else will you type an installed app name into the start menu and have it open Microsoft edge with shitty search results?
- They sort if did this with Windoes Vista, but instead of fixing issues, they just removed a ton of vulnerable code, which resulted in a bunch of dropped features lol.
  
  Unpopular opinion here, but Windows Vista was perfectly fine after SP1 was released. I migrated from XP-64 Bit to Vista and all around, it worked just as well (after SP1).
  The after SP1 thing is the important bit. Unfortunately, even though a lot of issues were fixed then, it already had it's reputation as dogshit.
  The other thing is, the NT6 kernel was really strong. MS needs to decouple their UI from the kernel. The Window 11 kernel is actually pretty good. It's the diabolically awful Windows 11 Interface that is the source of so much Windows evil.

THAT's a feature I recognize from Microsoft

I don't use windows unless it's for work, but I'll use https://windowsxlite.com/
I have no idea if they can be trusted but my notebooks run great. I just don't store any personal information on it.
- I love/hate their website. It reminds me of early 00 warez sites, but, as you say and testers report, it does a good job debloating and speeding things up. I'm so fed up with windows at this point I'm not sure a slimmed down and or privacy focused windows install will cut it. I'm this close to taking the dive and going to daily driving Linux.
  
  See my comment above yours, its really such a refreshing Windows experience, it feels like the good old days.
- I used to be an xlite fan, but have since discovered 11 IoT Enterprise LSTC. massgrave.dev
  Same idea of bullshit free, but more stable and straight from M$, themselves. Defender and Edge ONLY.
  Then install StartAllBack on top of that. Everything feels sane, and snappy and back to sanity.
  
  I did windows 10 ltsc for a very long time but I dropped eventually because I was tired of having issues with my video card and random unexplained crashes with vague event viewer info they no one had find reliable fixes to. Mass grave seems super nifty though, saving that link, maybe I give 11 iot a try but I'm feeling pretty burnt

Windows is such a RAM bomb and they're automatically installing new versions on machines with 4GB soldered unupgradable RAM, bleak

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