Wez Furlong I am Wez Furlong, Chief Software Architect at Message Systems, PHP Core developer and OpenSource contributor. I live in Maryland, USA with Juliette, Xander and Lily. (read more)

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MinimizeToTray + thunderbird == lower memory usage

Windows
Dec 18, 2005
Updated Dec 18, 2005

Having just set up the mozilla calendar plugin to launch when I open thunderbird, I was wondering how much memory I was going to be sacrificing to the GUI god. I was very pleasantly surprised to see that thunderbird.exe was consuming less than 2MB when minimized.

I put this down to MinimizeToTray. My guess is that it's calling SetProcessWorkingSetSize(GetCurrentProcess(), 0xffffffff, 0xffffffff) to swap the process out of memory when minimized.

Yep, after a while, the memory usage creeps back up again, as thunderbird does its background bits and pieces, like checking mail.

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