Saturday, April 12, 2008

An interesting observation

I know Steve has been bugging me to start posting ;-) so I thought I'd start of small with a quick introduction and a small post for tonight. I'm Rob. I am a coworker of Steve.

Moving on - I'm sure everyone has heard a great deal of complaints regarding Windows Vista, so I thought I'd post an observation I made recently regarding memory usage of .NET applications. As you all know, managed applications tend to take up a bit more memory on average than unmanaged, and while the garbage collector does it's job admirably, a smaller memory footprint is always desirable.

So out of curiosity, I ran a small WPF application I've been developing for the past few months on both Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista SP1. I wasn't all that surprised to see that immediately after startup on XP SP2, my application was taking up ~28MB. Sounded reasonable for what I was doing.

What I was surprised by was the memory usage I saw when running it under Vista SP1 - it was under half as large - only ~13MB. Remember, this is the exact same code as under XP. As far as I know, other than the obvious interaction between WPF and Vista's DWM, WPF in .NET 3.5 is the 'same' WPF under both Vista and XP.

While we've known all along that Vista was meant to be the preferred platform for WPF applications, it was nice to see Vista running my application better than XP can run it.

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