michiel, besides we are turning over to windows now, as often answers are *yes and no* ...
Vienna Ensemble starts with about 50 MB RAM usage ... each inserted VI instance will add some amount ... of course a lot of information seems to be redundant, but in fact you would need the *space* to save a complete set of settings (you know the math ... 12 x 12 x 12 x all parameters) ... so 20 MB seems not too much in my view ... you might also notice RAM usage *toggles* a little bit depending on the subset of the GUI you are currently displaying ...
the garbage collecting .... well, this term seems not to fit for me in this case ... collecting garbage means basically to remove unused instances, processes, free unused memory, ect .... with sample streaming the processes and memory is not *unused* but just *currently not used* ... in both operating systems the memory requested for the sample headers is *marked as not to be paged out* ... whereas winXP does fulfill this requirement, apple has confirmed OS X does not and i'm currently not sure if VISTA really does (sometimes im under the impression it does not 100%) ... in any case i don't consider VISTA's prefetch technology as ideal solution for sampling machines.
however there is a lot more stuff which can be paged out and might affect the overall performance of a machine after pausing for a longer time ... wherever possible i therefore set the page file to *don't use* ... unfortunately some applications don't like that at all, so i'd try to set the lowest value possible to avoid windows trying to be more clever than the user ;-)
we must not forget ourdays systems are much more *multi purpose* operating systems than earlier ones and in my opinion less adjusted for realtime applications than ever before ... we need to handle that ...
to be sure how much RAM VE /VI takes always watch the task manager's process tab, maybe even inserting the virtual memory column - if MemoryUsage drops without reason (unloading an instrument) than the OS has tricked out the application ... i noticed that on XP and VISTA 64 on a 8 GB machine when loaded samples in VE went beyond ~7,5 GB ... nothing what makes sense of course, i've just been curious what happens ...
christian
and remember: only a CRAY can run an endless loop in just three seconds.