Visual Studio C++ : same program using different amounts of RAM under different executable names

Question

This might be a general question, but this problem is really getting me confused.

I have two different C++ applications, compiled with Visual Studio 2012, needing an instance of the same object. I have put a breakpoint before the creation of each object to measure the RAM usage by stepping my programs. The first one takes approximately 2.5 MiB more RAM after creating the object, while the second app is taking 30 MiB!

Both objects are created using a simple call to new with the same parameters. The code behind the constructors is the same.

As a detail: the first project contains much fewer .cpp files than the second one. So I thought it might be a problem of internal fragmentation of the exe. Plus, I've also tried to break BEFORE any code was executed inside the main function, and the memory usage was already much different (6 MiB for the first app, 35 MiB for the second one).

Does anyone have any idea what might be going on?

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EDIT : The said object is a DirectX context, with a constructor creating a Direct3D instance and a device. Both the instance AND device are created the same way, but both have different RAM usage between the two apps.

Here is the code for the D3D device creation :

d3d_presentParams = new D3DPRESENT_PARAMETERS; ZeroMemory( d3d_presentParams, sizeof(D3DPRESENT_PARAMETERS) );
d3d_presentParams->Windowed = !window->isFullscreen();
d3d_presentParams->SwapEffect = D3DSWAPEFFECT_DISCARD;
d3d_presentParams->hDeviceWindow = window->getHwnd();
d3d_presentParams->MultiSampleType = antiAlias;
d3d_presentParams->EnableAutoDepthStencil = true;
d3d_presentParams->AutoDepthStencilFormat = D3DFMT_D32F_LOCKABLE;
d3d_presentParams->PresentationInterval = (info.m_vsync ? D3DPRESENT_INTERVAL_ONE : D3DPRESENT_INTERVAL_IMMEDIATE);

{
    d3d_presentParams->BackBufferCount  = 1;
    d3d_presentParams->BackBufferFormat = D3DFMT_A8R8G8B8;
    d3d_presentParams->BackBufferWidth  = m_viewportSize.x;
    d3d_presentParams->BackBufferHeight = m_viewportSize.y;
}
    
d3d->CreateDevice(
    D3DADAPTER_DEFAULT,
    D3DDEVTYPE_HAL,
    window->getHwnd(),
    D3DCREATE_HARDWARE_VERTEXPROCESSING | D3DCREATE_MULTITHREADED,
    d3d_presentParams,
    &d3d_device);

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EDIT 2 : Problem has been "solved" for now. See the answer below.

Answer 1

Alright, I "solved" it, kind of. You're not going to believe what the problem was.

TL;DR : Renaming the executable lowers the RAM usage from 80 MiB to 28 MiB. It seems that Windows is suspicious of non-verified applications, as I discovered a directory full of logs inside C:/Users/<Me>/AppVerifierLogs/ .

It seemed that RAM usage was linked to how many sources files it contained. Thus, I tried copying one of my projects entirely. I had to rename it, because a solution cannot have two projects with the same name... And guess what, memory usage was down to 7.3 MiB at the beginning of main() , instead of 30 MiB previously.

Later, I found out that it was a specific executable name that caused it to use more memory. I simply renamed the .exe file, and the problem was gone. I even tried to rename Firefox's exe by my app's name, and it made it crash.

And finally, I discovered in C:/Users/<me>/AppVerifierLogs/ at least 3000 files named after my application. This immediately made me think about the way Windows tries to verify applications (eg in order to see if they're not viruses).

I have no idea where this is coming from, nor how to turn off this verfier, but it's really annoying as a dev to have Windows panicking about an application you're developping, and injecting (possibly useless) stuff inside it.

The fix for now is just to rename the executable. If anyone knows about which application might have access to this "AppVerifierLogs" directory, please mention it, because even Google searches dont't seem to be able to help at this point...