Why does an empty WPF Application consume 50MB?

Question

I'm on Vista 64 and a blank 'WPF Application' template allocates 50MB when I press compile and run.

Surly this is way too much for an empty white box?!

Is there anything I can do to make my WPF applications less thirsty?

Jan

Answer 1

50 MB doesn't sound like that much for a modern application that makes heavy use of shared libraries.

Measuring memory usage is something of a black art. On some systems, apps which display the memory usage of a given app include in that total memory used by any shared libraries used by that app. But that memory is in fact being used by all apps using that library. What is reporting the "50Mb" number to you? Task manager?

Generally speaking, I'd say that rather than worrying about unavoidable overhead for abstract use cases, it's better to develop your application and then analyze its memory usage in context to how it impacts performance.

Hope that helps.