Memory usage?

Question

Why the heck does a c#-program use so much memory? I tested a small application in c++ and in c#.. The c++ version used about 7mb memory and the c#-version used 21mb.. Thats sick!

public 0 · Answer

Hi to everybody my first post :) And sorry for my english and I am from Spain. My last aplication was a password generator. The code was very short but it uses 18MB :( I don´t think it´s a big problem today computers have a lot of memory but it could be less.

spgilmore · Answer

I've seen much worse and I don't care for it either. I've been running some tests on the performance of C# vs Delphi.NET vs Delphi for Win32 and C++. What I've found is that .NET applications are much faster than native applications when allocating memory (it's about the only thing they do faster). I believe this to be the result of a complex and powerful memory management scheme employed by the JIT compiler. I believe that the memory used is probably a custom heap or something of that nature used by this memory manager. I've yet to prove that though. Any ideas folks? Anyway there are very few things you can do about handling memory in managed code. One thing that you can do is invoke the garbage collector manually by calling System.GC.Collect(). I've tested this and know it to reclaim at least some memory when it's called.