Why Does VS.NET Take So Much Memory?

Every morning, when I get in the office, I fire up Visual Studio.NET 2003. Most days I keep it running the entire day. Its memory footprint amounts to about 49M at first, but I as compile and recompile a gazillion of times during the day it takes up close to 110M by the end of the day! My co-worker noticed the same. I'm lucky to have 768M on my PC. Otherwise, with both ASP.NET and VS.NET getting bloated to such an extent, I'd be swapping non-stop.

I can understand why the memory footprint of ASP.NET grows and grows and..., but what's up with VS.NET?

Hey Milan,

I've noticed the same thing. Weird. I often will have a couple of copies of VS.NET running at once during the day - but I always have at least one copy open. Like you, I don't care so much (my workstation has 2gigs ram), but I've always thought it was strange.

-Ryan

I never noticed this problem before, even though I'd run four instances of VS for a few hours at a time. It was only AFTER I had read your post that it happened to me. :) Not only that, I had been seeing weird, unexpected behaviour with my code that I spent an afternoon debugging. Others were brought in to take a look, too. Once I noticed the 192MB of RAM it was taking up, I restarted VS. Now everything is working just fine, the code runs as expected. Too weird. I don't think it'll be any better with VS 2005 either.