title: .NET EXE memory footprint
body: <p>Even a simple <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notepad_%28software%29" rel="noreferrer">Notepad</a> application in C# consumes megabytes of RAM as seen in the task manager. On minimizing the application the memory size in the task manager goes down considerably and is back up when the application is maximized.</p>
  
  <p>I read somewhere that the .NET process reserves a lot of memory for runtime allocation in advance. That's why .NET applications have a larger memory footprint to start with. But this memory can be released using Win32 API calls. A trade-off is that runtime allocation becomes slow -  is that true?</p>