High unmanaged Memory - WPF Application

Question

I'm about to deploy my new WPF application and I've just noticed in the Task Manager that it was consuming a lot of memory. So I downloaded a trial of RedGate Antz to try and find out what was causing this issue and I was shocked to see about 90 MB of unmanaged memory usage. Because Antz does not support unmamaged memory I then tried to use Windbg which did not point to a high usage itself. This leads me to believe it must be one of the DLLs I'm loading. I'm using the DevExpress controls in my application.

An interesting feature is when I minimize my application the memory drops right down from say 110 MB to about 6-10 MB.

Should I be concerned / worried?

This is my first WPF application and I'm not totally sure what to expect in terms of memory usage. Does the fact when minimized this memory is regained/given up a sign that everything is ok?

Any thoughts or ideas on what could be causing this would be most helpful.

Answer 1

I've had good luck with SciTech's .Net Memory Profiler (memprofiler.com) if you want to know specifically what's causing it.

With the nature of the .Net runtime, if you're running on a machine that has plenty of memory available then it will generally try to use it. If you start seeing performance problems related to it then you should worry, and generally it's good to be aware of what is using resources regardless. A probable reason for the drop in memory is one of the DLLs may hook to your main Window's events and invoke a garbage collection on minimize.

If you're concerned about the perception of high memory usage there are tricks you can play to massage the numbers that show up in TaskManager (like p/invoking SetProcessWorkingSetSize), but that doesn't seem to be really what you're asking about.