Microsoft talks about reclaiming memory from Metro style apps in Windows 8

In the next in their Windows 8 series, Microsoft talk about reclaiming memory from Metro style apps.

Here is how the article begins:

Previous blog posts have discussed the Metro style application model using Windows Runtime. An important attribute of this app model is that apps are suspended when they are no longer visible to the user. Suspending Metro style apps in the background is a good thing, as it conserves CPU for other apps and ensures that background apps don’t cause activity that can consume resources, thereby improving the battery life and increasing responsiveness. This is outlined in detail in Sharif Farag and Ben Srour’s blog post, Improving power efficiency for applications.

But what about the memory these apps are taking up when suspended? We pointed out earlier that, as a practical matter, the OS will handle this and that your other processes will not feel memory pressure because there are suspended processes. This was an important design consideration. But we know that some of you are still curious how this will all work.

Starting with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, whenever Windows detects memory pressure on the system, it will repurpose nearly all the memory that suspended Metro style apps would otherwise hold onto. Windows 8 can reclaim this memory without having to terminate an app.

To read the rest of the article, click here.

And don’t forget that there are now only going to be 3 versions of Windows 8.