I think this question comes down to when, if ever, does the managed heap get
reduced in size and the memory deallocated and returned to the OS. I don't
know the answer, but experience suggests that the answer is "hardly ever".
--
Phil Wilson
[Microsoft MVP Windows Installer]
"Surain Shen" <looong.shin (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote

"Phil Wilson" <phil.wilson (AT) wonderware (DOT) something.com> wrote
I'm not sure about the actual heap size, but we frequently see the Working
Set size (as reported by Task Manager) be reduced.

If I go through the excersize in our XMPP server to Log in 10,000 users I'll
see the memory on the server jump up to 320 megs or so. When I log the users
out, the memory goes down a fair bit.

--
Chris Mullins, MCSD.NET, MCPD:Enterprise, MVP C#
http://www.coversant.net/blogs/cmullins

I believe the OPs question is directed at individual processes. At that
level, a managed process could build a huge managed heap due to (say)
initialisation code. Then the app releases a lot of that memory but still
has that huge managed heap, so its Private Bytes value is still very large
but might be mostly unused managed heap. Does some of that unused managed
heap memory ever get returned back to the system? That's the issue.
--
Phil Wilson
[Microsoft MVP Windows Installer]
"Chris Mullins [MVP]" <cmullins (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> wrote