Comment by asdfasgasdgasdg
4 hours ago
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.
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.
And Microsoft has incentive to force users to upgrade because their computers need more RAM, disk, and CPU
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.
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.
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.
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.