As I was investigating excessive memory usage problems in my ASP.NET application I noticed that the production server seems to use a lot more RAM than my development machine for the exact same input. It turned out to be the difference between IIS (w3wp.exe) and WebDev.WebServer.EXE. I ran the same test on my machine in IIS and WebDev with the following numbers shown for "Private Bytes" in Process Explorer:
IIS: 1,018 MB WebDev: 640 MB
Why is there such a drastic difference? What is IIS using all this memory for? Please don't tell me it allocates an extra 400MB "just in case"!
I'm running .NET 3.5 SP1, building with Visual Studio 2008, on Windows XP x64 SP2.