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This is the oddest thing I've ever had on a OS. I run several programs that uses up to 1 gb ram. But if i minimize the program the ram useage of it decreases too 100 mb! It means i lost 900 mb ram just disapeared where did it go? How can i keep the memory where it is?

On my own laptop the program is running fine without losing ram.

Also the program doesn't crash right after but after a few days(it won't find what it needs in the memory) with is kinda odd...

This is literly a Memory leak.(it just misses ram)

I hope someone can help me on this !

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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This is actually a known feature of Windows XP/2003. I'm not sure if Windows 7/2008/R2 retained this behavior.

The working set of an application is trimmed when its top-level window is minimized
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/293215

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Your program is not "missing" any RAM. Operation systems use a process called "paging" to outsource the content of your RAM that is not needed right now to the hard disk --> page file.

When the data is needed again it is located on the harddisk and loaded into RAM again.

Now, when you minimize a program, much of the resources won't be needed right now, as there is nothing to display while it's minimized. Windows therefore writes the content to the page file to free up memory that may be used by other programs.

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    Also, just for clarification: A memory leak would mean that a program allocates memory but doesn't release it later. So in the course of runtime the program would consume more and more memory instead of less as you think it to be. Wikipedia provides a very good pseudocode example on that.
    – LumenAlbum
    Mar 3, 2012 at 12:55

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