How to minimize memory usage in windows

Question

I wrote a hello world program (windows application without any UI) in C#. The release-build excutable doesn't do anything but to Thread.Sleep(50000) //50 seconds. I opened sysinternals (a profiler like task manager). This excutable ate 7MB memory (private bytes)!! Can anybody explain what is happening and how to make the memory usage smaller. PS I also tried to use NGEN to pre-compile the .exe but still got the same memory usage.

Thanks a lot

Answer 1

C# (and other JIT compiled/interpreted languages) usually end up doing a lot of things for you automatically in the background. While what you've written is simple, there's a lot of stuff going on in the background to support the JIT nature of the application.

That 7MB of memory is relatively small given 2GB of RAM is fairly commonplace these days. And it probably won't go up more unless you do something unusual or allocate lots of arrays and data structures.

If it's a Hello World based on the C# WindowsApplication project type, and there's an int main in Program.cs doing an application.run on a Windows Form, then not only is there a lot of JIT overhead, but there's a lot of Windows Forms overhead too.

End of the day, I'm sure everything is dandy.

Answer 2

.Net apps have a lot of basic overhead, but your memory increase should be relatively small after that point.

Example. My one app consumes 10MB of memory on load, but it only consumes 40MB of memory after loading 60k rows from a Database, each row containing multiple strings and many values.

A small fixed upfront value isn't that bad, on modern computers. Scalability is the primary issue now-a-days. .Net scales fairly well for being managed.