Dont ask me why, but I just had a look at the memory usage of my computer and I was somewhat shocked. I think somewhat shocked is actually an understatement. I think I fairly well am what would be called a ‘Power User’, but I did not think I would stress my computer that much. For instance, there is a thing called a ‘Page File’ which is an area on disk that will emulate RAM when you do not have enough real memory. Well, according to windows Task Manager, I am using about 2 GBytes of Swap File.

This slightly concerned me. So I had a look at memory usage, and peak memory usage. Right now Internet Explorer is using about 550 MBytes of RAM!!! You heard right. This is IE7, so it has tabs, and there are 9 windows open so that I just do a refresh for the sites that need refreshing, or just have the windows open on the sites that I am reseaching temporarily.

What is more is that I found how to add another column to the table – Peak Memory Usage. The peak usage of Internet Explorer is 810 MBytes. I have computers in this house with less HDD space than that! Then comes VisualStudio/VisualBasic at 158 MBytes, Outlook at 118M and Word at 100 MBytes. Just those four programs used up 1.2 GBytes of peak memory, and are using about 700 MBytes right now.

Probably the worst offender in my view is not IE. I can understand why it would need 500 MBytes in runtime – I am telling it to do a lot of work. With plugins like Macromedia Flash and the like memory does get used. But there is a program with 52 MBytes peak usage, although it is only using 25 MBytes right now. And this same program was the 4th highest usage of graphical resources on the machine too. What is this program? MSN Messenger. How could anyone write such a simple program which uses so much memory? Only microsoft I would guess…