I am working in Delphi 5 (with FastMM installed) on a Win32 project, and have recently been trying to drastically reduce the memory usage in this application. So far, I have cut the usage nearly in half, but noticed something when working on a separate task. When I minimized the application, the memory usage shrunk from 45 megs down to 1 meg, which I attributed to it paging out to disk. When I restored it and restarted working, the memory went up only to 15 megs. As I continued working, the memory usage slowly went up again, and a minimize and restore flushed it back down to 15 megs. So to my thinking, when my code tells the system to release the memory, it is still being held on to according to Windows, and the actual garbage collection doesn't kick in until a lot later.

Can anyone confirm/deny this sort of behavior? Is it possible to get the memory cleaned up programatically? If I keep using the program without doing this manual flush, I get an out of memory error after a while, and would like to eliminate that. Thanks.