I was experiencing the joys of IE7 tonight (multiple 404 errors trying to enter Passport sites after XP SP2 resumes from Standby Mode) and decided to give up and reboot. After the reboot I hit to Ctrl-Alt-Delete and launched the Task Manager to watch the show.
So as I sit patiently watching, my 1.5 GB of RAM gets slowly eaten by the loading applications: Anti-Virus, MSN Messenger, ZoneAlarm & FolderShare, etc. And when the hard drive activity stops, I launch Outlook 2007 B2TR.
Little-by-little, the RAM usage climbs slowly as Outlook 2007 connects to RPC over HTTPS, syncs with SBS, and then continues to climb as Outlook updates the RSS feeds. Eventually, RAM usage for Outlook peaks at 110 MB (pictured below).
But 110,428 K of RAM usage isn’t the odd part. A few minutes later, Outlook 2007 drops down to 15 MB of RAM. It stays there for 2 minutes, and then climbs back up to 49 MB and sits happily ever after (even as I type this).
So my question is, ‘How in the world did Outlook go down to 15 MB of RAM, and why?’ As you can see from the screen shot above, even MSN Messenger uses 15 MB. This isn’t one of the great mysteries of life – just a curious observation to which I haven’t been able to Google an answer.