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I’ve got a couple of .NET desktop apps running on my work system (with a gig of RAM nonetheless) and it seems like they are always the applications that are sucking up the most memory.

I run Sharpreader at work for a couple of interesting feeds and it hovers around 70MB when open!  Minimizing it seems to reduce the working set to 2MB, but it’s still using 69MB of virtual memory while sitting there.

A GUI monitoring tool that I wrote for Draco.NET seems to take up 30MB (plus 30MB of swap) all the time while it’s sitting in the taskbar.  It’s basically just a WinForms app that calls a remoting service - no fancy tricks.

We seem to be at the same place with .NET apps now that we were with Java apps five years ago - they hog tons of memory. 

Is there any way to get your apps to run leaner?  Heck, the AVG anti-virus console on my home computer uses 2MB of total RAM.  That’s physical + virtual.

For now, I’m questioning the usage of .NET for any application that normally runs in the background.  I’m not sure that 60MB for a simple monitoring app is a good call.