I’ve noticed something odd when running resource intensive programs under Window, such as games. If you run the game in windowed mode and look at the memory usage you can see that it goes in the order of hundreds of megabytes for 2D games. But if you minimize that game, I’ve seen the memory usage go as low as a few megabytes, even less than ten.
What exactly is happening? Who’s doing this, the games or the OS? Surely, the resources can’t actually be unloaded from memory (that would be awful), so what’s with the drop?
Windows trims the working set of a process when its main window is minimized. The working set isn’t necessarily the best indicator of how much system resources a process is using.