Reducing WinForm Memory Footprint with SetWorkingSet(reference)

Windows Forms apps are pretty bloated in terms of memory usage. The main reason .Net apps have such a huge footprint is that the JIT compiler loads when the app starts and all that bootstrap code and a ton of the WinForms engine is loaded and compiled at startup and gets loaded into your process. Beside the fact that this takes up processor cycles it also consumes a lot of memory. The JIT is pretty good about which code gets compiled – for the most part it compiles only code that actually gets run, but the framework itself pulls in a lot of code as well and that gets compiled as well. Third party controls - ditto. The result of this is that on startup your app consumes a lot of resources that you will not need any longer once the app is up and running. Actually if you access another new part of the application that part will compile later, but for many apps the startup and main application form make up a huge chunk of what gets loaded and compiled as the data engine and business objects etc. usually are among the things that get called at startup. A large percentage generally gets compiled right at startup. Windows Forms apps are pretty bloated in terms