Working set of memory

Question

Hi,

Why does the memory decrease when you minimize an Application ? I found this out while running a Flash Application in IE. It was taking around 200 MB memory but when I minimized the IE it came down to 5 MB's. I saw similar behaviour with Outlook and other EXE's.

I googled and found out that the working set of a process decreases when a window is minimized.

Is this documented by Microsoft ? What part of the working set is actually removed ? Is that part sent to the virtual memory?

What are the implications of this on performance ?

Does this behaviour prevail in Linux too ?

Answer 1

Windows automatically does this. This link seems relevant

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/293215

You also get applications where behaviour can be adjusted. I do know that for browsers such as firefox you can set whether memory is released when minimized

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Config.trim_on_minimize

In terms of Linux, I guess this is more specific to window managers such as KDE/GNOME rather than the kernel