.NET EXE memory footprint

Question

Even a simple Notepad application in C# consumes megabytes of RAM as seen in the task manager. On minimizing the application the memory size in the task manager goes down co

Answer 1

The reason for the large memory footprint is that the JIT compiler and Windows Forms engine are being loaded with your process. To reduce this, you can do the following:

[DllImport("psapi.dll")]
static extern int EmptyWorkingSet(IntPtr hwProc);

static void MinimizeFootprint()
{
    EmptyWorkingSet(Process.GetCurrentProcess().Handle);
}

This should remove as much as possible from your memory footprint. There may be a way that you can also reduce the amount of memory that is set aside for runtime memory allocation.