this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
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Preloading File Explorer in Windows 11 Doubles RAM Usage, Offers Minimal Speed Boost (www.techpowerup.com)
submitted 1 week ago by IonTempted@lemmynsfw.com to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world 66 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

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.

[–] morgenman@lemmy.world 34 points 1 week ago

Yea the damn start menu is an electron app now. Ffs where did we go wrong?

[–] IonTempted@lemmynsfw.com 9 points 1 week ago (3 children)

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.

[–] Melonpoly@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] Axolotl_cpp@feddit.it 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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

[–] orclev@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Resolve has some quirks on Linux. In particular it doesn't support certain codecs.

[–] Axolotl_cpp@feddit.it 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Really? I never heard of it but at the same time i didn't really used it

[–] Codilingus@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 week ago

If you reformat, look into 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC. massgrave.dev

[–] rbos@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] BrightCandle@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] chronicledmonocle@lemmy.world 60 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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"

[–] chronicledmonocle@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Microsoft: "What was that? You want CoPilot integrated so it can search through your files for data mining.....I mean helping you find stuff?"

[–] nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 week ago

imagine using a cloud-based AI to do the same thing as mlocated

[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

What the headline doesn't say either: just use Linux already as that just works

Yes, I'm that guy, sorry, not sorry

[–] chronicledmonocle@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

As a fellow Linux enjoyer: Yup

[–] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 26 points 1 week ago

You know what would really solve this issue?

That's right! Adding AI (read: LLM) to it!

[–] cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 21 points 1 week ago (5 children)

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.

[–] bbwolf1111@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They only care about siphoning our data and advertising to us. And vibe coding apparently. Such a buggy pos these days.

[–] bbwolf1111@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 week ago

Well I dual boot & the preview update they sent for explorer crashes every time it tries to install during a restart & it says something went wrong, then takes another 10 mins to clear that. Honestly don't login to Win 11 unless I'm playing a multiplayer anticheat game at this point. And I used to bleed green/blue. I had the Windows phone, Xbox all of then, a gaming PC & laptop. I'm degoogling my phone & using Linux for everything else. I still have the switch as well. They got me there with Zelda

[–] ragepaw@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] unhrpetby@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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).

[–] ragepaw@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago

This is my point.

[–] cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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 😅

[–] ragepaw@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Right, but that's not a high memory problem, that's a Windows is shit at managing memory problem.

If MS fixed that, you could easily run memory hot at >90% without issue.

It's also a software developers are making poor products problem. Even back when I was on Windows, I swapped out MS Office for Libre Office and then OnlyOffice. In both cases, my system performed better just by not running MS Office. That's not a memory usage problem.

On my work laptop. which runs Windows, I removed the entire Adobe suite, which I don't use for anything, and my overall system responsiveness increased. Again, not a memory issue, an poor programming issue.

Devs (the companies, not the individual programmers) know that users will throw more RAM at a problem, so it absolves them of the need to write better code. If Windows had a better memory manager, and Office and Adobe were more efficient, you wouldn't need more RAM.

Also, just to clarify a point. Right now, web browsers, the worst abuser of memory, are taking up 24GB of ram on my system.

Because I have no memory swapping issues, I keep many open web browsers, which most people can't if they are on Windows because it's crap at memory management.

So our list grows to, crappy memory management on Windows, crappy development of web browsers, crappy development of applications, and crappy web pages (as you say).

None of that is a low memory problem, it's all poor software development. When RAM was super expensive, developers (again companies, not individuals) got lazy and stopped caring about efficiency.

We don't need more RAM, we need better code. There is no reason anyone running normal usage should need that much RAM.

To make my point, I just SSHed into my wife's Linux PC, which she never closes anything, and this is her memory usage with a bunch of browsers doing all the normal things she does, and multiple spreadsheets open in OnlyOffice.

Memory: Total: 16278284 Used: 6254884 Available: 10023400

Edit: BTW, I do understand your point. You can't fix any of that. My point is we need to put blame where blame is due. And it's not that memory is low.

[–] cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's not a windows is shit at managing memory problem though. If you have 1MB of RAM left and you open something, something has to happen. A process killed, an alert generated, something moved to disk instead of RAM (paging), or a system lockup or something. This is the management piece. What to do when you're out.

[–] ragepaw@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago

That is entirely a shit at managing memory problem.

If you have 1 MB of RAM left, firstly, your OS has not properly managed it's resources. It should have reserved system RAM. Secondly, a good memory manager will have swapped out unused, or low priority pages.

And that's not just a system issue. A well developed piece of software will unload (or never load) parts of the software that are not needed at runtime.

I'm going to give you a great example I just read about today, about bad programming practices. The install of Helldivers 2 has been reduced from 154GB to 23 GB. That's a reduction of 85%. This was driven by de-duplication of code. So, while this is a storay about storage space, ask how many modules and functions were duplicated, and how many of those were loaded independently into RAM.

Bad programming in one area, means bad programming in all areas.

With your 1 MB example, I would ask if all of the devs who created all of the other programs on the system had written better and more efficient code, would you still need more RAM? The answer is no.

[–] phx@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

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

[–] deltapi@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago

Ya that would not be a sustainable option in my case unfortunately.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 week ago

My Debian server without an DE takes about 900MB on boot

[–] Toes@ani.social 19 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

They should just rollback to windows xp and patch the security issues. It happily ran on 128MB of ram.

[–] cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 week ago

But how else will you type an installed app name into the start menu and have it open Microsoft edge with shitty search results?

[–] mlg@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] ragepaw@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Krudler@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You know that Vista was an irredeemable piece of shit. Don't know why you're bothering to defend it.

[–] ragepaw@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago

Because it wasn't. After SP1, and moreso after SP2 it was perfectly fine.

[–] Jhex@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

THAT's a feature I recognize from Microsoft

[–] Obamakitten@lemdro.id 4 points 1 week ago

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

[–] GaryGhost@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

[–] nullroot@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Codilingus@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 week ago

See my comment above yours, its really such a refreshing Windows experience, it feels like the good old days.

[–] Codilingus@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] nullroot@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

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