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WhatsApp is the worst app on your Windows 11 PC right now, eating 1.2GB of RAM doing nothing
(www.windowslatest.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2026
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WhatsApp is not even in my phone now...
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".
The problem with electron apps is that it's not unused or infrequently used memory
The app is always lagging behind the web version too, it's just not worthy it.
What do you mean, the app is the web version now
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.
Sorry, it was a while ago since I used the app version from the Store.
2nd after Windows.
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)
What is either of these 2 archaic sounding things you speak of?