Overhead of individual python apps

[Qopit]

Thanks - this is all very interesting...

> Ah, but is that physical memory consumed, or virtual memory MAPPED
> to the processes.

and

> for python, the "private" memory use is usually ~1.5 megabytes for a "empty" 2.4
> process, and some of that will only occupy space in the paging file...  for firefox with
> a simple page loaded into a single tab, the private space is ~10 megabytes)

and most useful:

> http://www.itwriting.com/dotnetmem.php

I had no idea that the memory usage reported by Windows Task Manager
(WTM) was so different than what I expected it would be.  It doesn't
seem terribly useful to me right now.

After looking into that link (and discovering the perfmon app... can't
believe I never knew about such an amazingly useful tool!) below are
the results of some memory reporting checks that I ran on the simple
one-liner app (x = raw_input()).  The "On Launch" is what was reported
immediately after launching the app, and the "Window Min'd" is
following a simple minimization for the window.

Memory report:              On Launch   Window Min'd
--------------              ---------   ------------
WTM Mem Usage:                 2,756K           88K
PerfMon Private bytes:      1,540,096     1,540,096
PerfMon Working set:        2,822,144        90,112 **

Basically it looks like the privately allocated memory for a 2.3 app
that cannot be shared by other processes (close to what I want,
neglecting paging possibilities) is the 1.5 MB that Fredrik reported.
Presumably using perfmon as well?

Maybe I'm a stickler, but this still seems pretty high for each and
every application to need to privately hold.  Am I still misreading
this somehow?  If not, I'd still love for this to be smaller... is
there any way to reduce this further?

Russ

** There was an interesting transient in the Working set during
minimization all the way up to 9 MB... presumably this is because
during minimization the "set of memory pages touched recently" jumps up
because of the transactions needed for the minimization.