> The thing that the task manager doesn't tell you is whether or not these are shared components. It may be that the 662 MB used by the "Renderer" is shared between many Windows components, so killing that Weather app may not reclaim as much space as you may hope, instead, it would require killing every user of the component, some may be core system apps.

It is the other way around, shared memory causes Task Manager to _underestimate_ memory usage. Task Manager's default views report the process private working set, no shared memory included. This means that 662MB is the _minimum_ amount of memory commit that would be released by ending the process.

> the OS can overcommit

Windows does not allow overcommit by default. It may compress or optimize memory allocations to reduce the physical working set, but the kernel will start failing memory allocations once physical + swap is exhausted regardless.

> It may be that the 662 MB used by the "Renderer" is shared between many Windows components

From the screenshot in the article, this is the memory usage of the Renderer process spawned by the Weather App. I find it very unlikely that some other app (say, the Copilot app) can then piggyback on Weather Renderer process. Do you have a source for this?

> killing that Weather app may not reclaim as much space

Closing the weather app on my PC does in fact kill all child processes and frees up around 1GB of committed RAM. Are you not seeing the same?

Separate Renderer and GPU Process is just typical webview2/electron

The weather app itself and the framework it runs on are the same thing when talking about resource usage.

> It is clear from the article that what eats up so much RAM is not the weather app itself but the framework it runs on. There is a "Renderer", a "GPU Process",... eating most of it.

You say tomato we say tomahto

At the end of the day bloated app is a bloated app its consequences are the same.

> the 662 MB used by the "Renderer" is shared between many Windows components

Fine, shutdown the weather and stock ticker apps.