What's a reasonable amount of memory for a .NET application?-Collection of common programming errors

What do they actually mean by RAM? Is it Working Set, Private Working Set, Virtual Memory, etc., etc.? I just launched a fairly simple .Net app and it was taking up 21MB of working set, that’s 21MB of RAM. But its private working set is only 4MB so about 17MB is being taken up by system and shared libraries that would be used even if my app wasn’t loaded.

I then did some fairly memory intensive work with the app and the private working set went up to 28MB. I then switched to another memory intensive app and low and behold my private working set is now 8MB despite the fact that no memory has been released.

An application’s use of RAM is extremely difficult to measure and it is even more difficult to decide whether or not any memory use is “too much” (outside of something outrageous of course).

Unless your client is using carefully thought out performance counter measurements to indicate various types of memory use you don’t really know how much memory your app is using on their computers.

You don’t really have a memory problem what you have is a potentially tricky communications problem depending on the technical know how of the client. But RAM is cheap sounds a little flip and might not be your best approach.