WhatsApp is the worst app on your Windows 11 PC right now, eating 1.2GB of RAM doing nothing
https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/06/13/whatsapp-is-eating-1-2gb-ram-on-windows-11-even-as-microsoft-kills-web-app-slop/
608 points · 122 comments · view on lemmy.world
122 Comments
actionjbone@sh.itjust.works · 212 pts · 52d
Counterpoint: no, it's not, because I'm not stupid enough to install it.
KingKong33@lemmy.ml · 87 pts · 52d
Or own a Windows PC!
actionjbone@sh.itjust.works · 8 pts · 52d
Sadly, I have one that I need for some freelance work. But I don't use it too much.
BagOfHeavyStones@piefed.social · 5 pts · 52d
Born in the PWA it was.
(I figure this limits what it can scrape from any OS.)
ChojinDSL@discuss.tchncs.de · 138 pts · 52d
Oh, it's most likely doing something. Just nothing you would want.
Kolanaki@pawb.social · 105 pts · 52d
Wouldn't Windows 11 be the worst app on your Windows 11 PC? 🤔
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org · 20 pts · 52d
It's probably just teams, right?
greybeard@feddit.online · 5 pts · 52d
It's all sharepoint under the hood.
thal3s@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 52d
Only for some file storage. The Teams app is a memory hog and hot garbage all on its own.
greybeard@feddit.online · 2 pts · 52d
I was joking for sure. Most of M365 is a hodgepodge of Exchange and Sharepoint, including Teams. But that's all server side, so doesn't matter to the client. They could make a the clients not terrible even if the server is hot garbage.
baines@lemmy.cafe · 2 pts · 52d
bitlocker and the encrypt without permission resulting in loss of all files still takes the cake for me
windows update boot loop is a close second
liking625@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 52d
I once read a story about a Teams team in microslop Teams, was hilarious.
P1nkman@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 52d
Technically.... Yes.
qupada@fedia.io · 71 pts · 52d
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 · 25 pts · 52d
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 · 13 pts · 52d
that's why you just skip the middleman and run it in your browser instead.
carotte@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 12 pts · 52d
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 · 8 pts · 52d
Your friend has disabled the swap file. Never a good idea.
dgriffith@aussie.zone · 5 pts · 52d
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 · 6 pts · 52d
I run 32GB and I still run a swapfile. My ssd is still going after 3 years, but everything dies.
wltr@discuss.tchncs.de · 6 pts · 52d
My SSDs are like ten to 15 years old, none are dead at this point. The cargo cult of swap files trashing everything.
selokichtli@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 51d
I used to make use of a 64 GB RAM machine that still swapped like crazy, because I'm a shitty programmer (not really my field). I totally destroyed my SSD by swapping daily huge amounts of data, but the thing survived the whole process. Of course it died, but under normal circumstances I can't see why people would be preoccupied for wearing their SSDs.
gemakey@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 52d
They don't care if you can't afford it. Data centers are buying them by the truckload.
Beacon@fedia.io · 8 pts · 52d
OP was talking about the software companies, not the ram companies
greybeard@feddit.online · 4 pts · 52d
Interestingly, in Microsoft's Build Conference this year, they were pushing for "Native applications" again. This is probably two fold, one because RAM is getting so expensive we'll probably start seeing 8GB laptops again, and two because AI will make something in whatever framework you tell it to, and has no problem maintaining separate code bases for each supported OS. Of course, that just means more tokens used as far as Microsoft is concerned, which is a win for them.
Zacryon@feddit.org · 42 pts · 52d
People using Meta's products are masochists.
"Yes, daddy, please violate my privacy even more and manipulate me into hating myself and making me addicted to your shit."
Newuser@lemmy.world · 19 pts · 52d
Well most people dont have any other option since 100% of your friends and families are exclusively on WhatsApp , whatsapp had early mover advantage it was free and easy to use so now everyone just uses it
Eheran@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 52d
If your friends can not be arsed to install an app on their phone for you, I got some bad news.
Newuser@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 52d
Actually it's not just friends ( we did shifted to telegram a while back ) most people where I am from use WhatsApp grand parents to grand parents to even some college official group ( yeah Ik )
tackleberry@thelemmy.club · 2 pts · 52d
so did my-space
HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 pts · 52d
Social media and chat applications are different, better comparison would be Skype or MSN Messenger or AIM.
FishFace@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 51d
And how long did it stay around even though there was a better option? And how much more penetration into everyday life does WhatsApp have today? Right.
wanderinglurk@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 52d
My government and employers would not move away from WhatsApp, so, short of lobbying, I am forced to remain.
dgriffith@aussie.zone · 40 pts · 52d
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.
saltesc@lemmy.world · 17 pts · 52d
And then a Windows Update comes along...
lechekaflan@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 52d
Install Linux, Problem Solved.
feannag@sh.itjust.works · 9 pts · 52d
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.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 52d
put that script in task scheduler on repeat. let it run every day
CanIFishHere@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 52d
If you put in an ssd, Windows should run just fine.
dgriffith@aussie.zone · 3 pts · 52d
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 · -2 pts · 52d
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.
Simon_Shitewood@lemmy.ml · 0 pts · 52d
If they were happy with 10 give them Mint, they won't even notice if you skin it.
sevenoverthree@lemmy.world · 36 pts · 51d
Oh it's doing plenty. Just not for you.
Jyek@sh.itjust.works · 35 pts · 52d
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 · 24 pts · 52d
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
NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip · 31 pts · 52d
Why would anyone put WhatsApp on their computer?
Stop using meta people!
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 52d
"Stop using meta people!" sounds like a protest chant for the second-class citizens of a B-grade cyberpunk dystopia.
morto@piefed.social · 9 pts · 52d
but we are second-class citizens in a B-grade cyberpunk dystopia...
wltr@discuss.tchncs.de · 5 pts · 52d
All you need is a lack of comma, huh!
carotte@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 7 pts · 52d
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 · 7 pts · 52d
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.
JustEnoughDucks@slrpnk.net · 4 pts · 52d
WhatsApp is used for businesses a ton here in the EU. A customer-facing business owner like a cafe/restaurant it is almost required in some places. So much much more than "inconvenient"
greybeard@feddit.online · 4 pts · 52d
That's interesting. I'm surprised there isn't a bigger backlash to requiring WhatsApp with the digital sovereignty push I've been hearing about. I work for a US based SaaS provider, and we spent a lot of marketing and sales resources assuring European businesses that we aren't part of the American push to take over the entire tech world.
NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 52d
True, I have to deal with this regularly.
They dont get my business or we work something else out.
CanIFishHere@lemmy.ca · 0 pts · 52d
How is using Whatsapp for free funding anything?
NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 51d
It is part of the larger Meta machine. Do you not ask to yourself, why are they letting me use this for free? It is a data harvester and tracker. It keeps you in the metaverse. It is a way to make the ad revenue for you worth more.
All these free services somehow add up to 60 billion in profit every year. And they are expanding, they plan to spend 125-135 billion in AI data centers. They are going to build data centers that will use hundreds of gigawatts in over 10 locations. The power used by each is in the scale of the same as powering all of San Francisco with some of these as 2 to 6 times as much as San Fransisco to put it into perspective.
They are going to use about 1,000 to 2000 acres each, use 1 to 3 million gallons of water a day (one site is asking for a permit to use 23 million gallons a day).
All because of people are using "free" apps.
CanIFishHere@lemmy.ca · 0 pts · 51d
I don't have Facebook or Instagram. I use WhatsApp to communicate with my family that are a mix of iOS and Android. I have never seen an ad. As I posted, my WhatsApp uses about 320MB of ram. I have nothing to be outraged about.
NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 51d
You are still contributing to the same situation. It harvests data, keeping you in the system and tracking your habits and connections. From recent reports meta is also reading everything you say. Who you connect to. Where you are.
You could use any other app you want to and not need this one.
You are actively participating in paying for metas activities, maybe that is worth thinking about.
CanIFishHere@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 51d
As you are as well by being on Lemmy. Just stop with the fear mongering. You claim ads. I don't see ads. The goal posts keep moving.
Killer57@lemmy.ca · 0 pts · 52d
There are advertisements inside of WhatsApp, advertisements in turn make money, that money goes to meta. I hope this helps you understand.
CanIFishHere@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 51d
I use Whatsapp every day and I've never seen an ad. There's no need to be so condescending.
Comfort0957@lemmy.ml · -1 pts · 52d
I get the privacy concerns but social isolation is worse for you. Do what you can and don't stress that much about it.
NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 51d
Privacy is a tiny part of it. It's the directly supporting and funding a multi billion dollar corporation that is actively make everything worse for everyone. Go look at all their planned projects.
The easiest thing to do is not play along. If you are relying on whatsapp for socializing doesn't that make you want to leave even more?
Comfort0957@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 51d
No, why would that be the case? All these companies are terrible and there's so much that boycotting can do without isolating you from your social circles. Here in Brazil it was already weird to be telling people I don't have Instagram. Not having WhatsApp means you won't do a lot of stuff, including talking to your doctor. It's not my choice, it's a systemic dependence and yeah, it sucks.
NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 51d
Gotta break the cycle somehow. Participating is being complicit.
I too had that issue with a doctor. I worked it out though. It's hard when everyone depends on WhatsApp, but I refuse to play along. I will hang out with people who get that, I don't want to associate with people who don't care.
imetators@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 52d
I wish and I am accumulating contacts on Signal as of late. But removing WhatsApp is impossible off my phone. Literally everyone are using it around here and I wish they wouldn't.
NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip · 0 pts · 51d
Then remove it. Someone has to take a stand. I did. Yes everyone around me used it too. If they support a worse world, AI, billionaires and fascism I don't really want to communicate with them anyways.
LemmyEntertainYou@piefed.social · -1 pts · 52d
Why would anyone put Windows on their computer?
jjlinux@lemmy.zip · 28 pts · 52d
Not too sure about the 'doing nothing' part.
1984@lemmy.today · 3 pts · 52d
True.
boonhet@sopuli.xyz · 23 pts · 52d
My Windows 11 PC? Where?
My Linux PC doesn't have WhatsApp installed. Someone tell me where this Windows 11 PC is so I can retrieve it and install Linux on that too.
ramenshaman@lemmy.world · 20 pts · 52d
Anything owned by facebook is already the worst app on whatever device it's installed on.
CanIFishHere@lemmy.ca · 17 pts · 52d
I don't know who is doing the testing, but they don't know what they're doing. 313MB
nexttech@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 52d
Look at mr moneybags over here
CanIFishHere@lemmy.ca · 5 pts · 52d
The screenshot is from my $300 HP Elite Desk 4. It doesn't support Win11, but I installed it anyway.
Oh, you meant Claude. I use the free version to help me write automations and dashboards for Home Assistant. I have never given Anthropic a dime.
LodeMike@lemmy.today · 5 pts · 52d
You cannot fish in lemmy as it's a website. Thank you for your understanding.
CanIFishHere@lemmy.ca · 3 pts · 52d
Can I at least get my bait back?
Solrac@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 52d
Your setup, with Win11 and Claude is the bait.
jaschen306@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 52d
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.
unitedwithme@lemmy.today · -4 pts · 52d
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 · 5 pts · 52d
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.
unitedwithme@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 52d
Well, fine, right, I'm not saying I want something to use all 64GB, but I'm not going to be upset if something used a few GB. Chrome OS that way where it'll eat up all avail RAM, hence why so many memes. A lot of applications are written poorly and yes, RAM utilization will grow, but again, if I've got it, in many cases might as well use it.
Jyek@sh.itjust.works · 0 pts · 51d
Apps can reserve RAM without using it. It is totally normal for apps to do this on every modern OS. Linux included. The amount of RAM reserved is not the same as the amount of RAM that app is using. And apps don't have a strangle hold on R being reserved unless that RAM is actually in use. Windows will automatically take reserved RAM away from one app and give it to another app that is out of its reserve space. This is all very normal.
CanIFishHere@lemmy.ca · -3 pts · 52d
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.
As I mentioned earlier, I use the free version of Claude to help me with automations and dashboards in Home Assistant. It really is an incredible tool.
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.
unitedwithme@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 52d
Ohhh my bad, stupid swipe text corrected ram to team I guess...
Edge isn't a bad browser as far as functionality goes, but far from secure. But it's gotta I discovered vertical tabs while at work, so I added that extension in Firefox and now that's native too.
CanIFishHere@lemmy.ca · 2 pts · 51d
Btw, my PC has 32gb of ram where WhatsApp is using 320MB.
unitedwithme@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 51d
Oh. OK well that's good! Idk, maybe the tester left the PC running really long or just ran a bunch of convos to rack up RAM usage for the article
CanIFishHere@lemmy.ca · 2 pts · 51d
When I reported my Whatsapp was using 320MB it had been running for a week. The writer is just not that good when it comes to analyzing technology. He wants to trigger outrage, which it seems he has done.
Wispy2891@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 52d
I'm shocked to learn that a dedicated browser always running in the background for a chat app uses 100x the memory and resources
psycocan@lemmy.ml · 8 pts · 52d
It's most definitely doing alot
KingKong33@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 52d
The doing alot gets a lot done.
actionjbone@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 52d
Alot of Doing is a very productive alot.
lechekaflan@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 51d
I'm not using it nor the Facebook Messenger app, but rather their messenger in the browser. Meta is an evil necessity in my country because the businesses I deal with are mostly active on Facebook, and almost all people are tethered to it, and I have to use a facade where I don't have to give Zuck anything about myself.
Captainautism@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 7 pts · 52d
Where you fucked up is installing and using WhatsApp to begin with. It’s been shit since meta bought it.
KingKong33@lemmy.ml · 6 pts · 52d
And Windows.
Captainautism@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 52d
Exactly, if you’re still using windows in 2026, wtf are you even doing?!
terraquad@feddit.org · 1 pts · 52d
Sadly, Linux currently just isn't a one-to-one replacement for Windows, which is enough of a reason for most people to stay. (I say this as a Linux user myself)
blarth@thelemmy.club · 4 pts · 52d
I can’t imagine using anything under Meta’s control for personal communication.
ekZepp@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 51d
What Windows 11 pc exactly? 😎
CanIFishHere@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 51d
That one.
vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de · 7 pts · 52d
microsoft committments to ui frameworks can be gotten in bulk, for free at your nearest flea market
dan69@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 52d
Ew. Why not use the browser version
FishFace@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 51d
There is no other version. An electron app is a browser app.
spongeborgcubepants@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 51d
You can still just open it in the browser
FishFace@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 50d
How will that help?
xSikes@feddit.online · 6 pts · 52d
Or they’re mining your data….?
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca · 5 pts · 51d
Pah, only 1.2GB? How can it even move a mouse pointer or accept keyboard input?!?
rainbowbunny@slrpnk.net · 5 pts · 52d
I have a Windows 11 PC with WhatsApp?
tal@lemmy.today · 4 pts · 52d
As long as you have paging space --- and you almost certainly do --- in general, an OS should page out pages of memory used by software that isn't being frequently used.
It's possible that the program is allocating memory and then keeps hammering it to keep it resident, but most of the time, a program allocating more memory than it absolutely requires isn't honestly that big a deal, because the OS will handle it reasonably and just leave it in the pagefile.
I don't know what the mechanism is to report this on Windows, but you might try looking in mmc (Windows-R mmc Enter), if that's still a thing in Windows 11, as it has a bunch of process resource usage graphs.
On Linux, you'll probably want to be looking at RSS to find what's actually in physical memory (well, there can be shared memory and some other things, but RSS is probably a reasonably approximation). You can see this in
top.searches
If this is current, Windows probably calls it "Working Set".
ryannathans@aussie.zone · 3 pts · 52d
The problem with electron apps is that it's not unused or infrequently used memory
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 51d
Preferred by scammers
nuko147@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 52d
WhatsApp is not even in my phone now...
Comfort0957@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 52d
The app is always lagging behind the web version too, it's just not worthy it.
Wispy2891@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 52d
What do you mean, the app is the web version now
filcuk@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 51d
If that's the case, why not just use webview, instead of packing a whole separate browser?
Obviously not aiming that at you op, but if someone has an insight on this, I'm curious.
Comfort0957@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 51d
Sorry, it was a while ago since I used the app version from the Store.
terraquad@feddit.org · 1 pts · 52d
A great alternative is to create a Matrix account and connect a WhatsApp bridge bot with the WhatsApp account, that way you can use any lightweight Matrix client. (It also works cross-platform)
Hairyfishnuts@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 52d
ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 52d
2nd after Windows.
brem@lemmy.world · -1 pts · 52d
Windows 11?
I heard it's terrible
Many flavours of Linux
Are comparable
If you want Windows to spy & train on you
Simply open your doors
Let the verified perverts in too
ToolMenace@lemmy.ml · -7 pts · 52d
Unused RAM is wasted RAM. This is only a problem if windows doesn’t allocate a large portion of that ram to something else if/when it needs it, which windows does.