Access Manager

[Snave]

Question. Why does AM use only about 3.5 meg of RAM on startup but RAM continues to grow with usage? After filling in the login for just this forum, it has jumped to 13.3 meg and it routinely gets above 22 meg after a few days of staying open and filling forms. Is this normal as more passwords are cached or is there a memory leak or......?
It's not much of a problem on this XP Pro machine with loads of RAM but on my 256 meg Win98SE machine it's problematical at best.

Thanks.

[Richard]

Great question.

Access Manager utilises the .NET Framework windows component. This component manages memory for all .NET programs and decides how much to allocate. Generally, memory will not be reclaimed until it is needed by Windows or other applications.

For more information visit:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/1100/GCI/
and
http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/technologyinfo/overview/

[Snave]

Thanks for the reference. That's a very interesting article.
"...the managed heap gains these advantages [speed and simplicity] because it makes one really big assumption: address space and storage are infinite."

I also found it interesting from a philosophical standpoint. To wit:

"Finalizable objects get promoted to older generations, which increases memory pressure and prevents the object's memory from being collected when the garbage collector determines the object is garbage."

Too self referential for me!

"However, if the object requires finalization, the object is considered live again until it is actually finalized, and then it is permanently dead. In other words, an object requiring finalization dies, lives, and then dies again. This is a very interesting phenomenon called resurrection."

Nice philosophy carried one step too far.

Hope you didn't mind the digression. Thanks again.