Designer during work consume more and more memory. After few hours it could be 1-2GB until there will be "Out of memory" exception.
I've had perfmon running for a while during regular development sessions, and it is interesting. The Deployment service seems to have most issues, and very rarely gives up RAM. The Designer gives up RAM regularly, but overall tends to creep up to about 300-500MB on a 2GB VM. IE is the greatest hog of all, and that normally gives us a failure - the engine packs up as it does not have enough RAM.
Funnily enough, although the engine is the first to cop out, the engine RAM useage is almost flat - go Engine Team!
To run more easily during dev/testing, we run the engine web server and designer in a VM and access the client through the host PC. It saves having to bounce all these things regularly.
Jerome,
What version of IE do you have on that VM?
it was 7.0.5730.13
I shall try on the local environment soon and see what results perfmon give me
This is actually a Microsoft bug. Some of the elements that the designer is using are some of the same ones that Visual Studio 2008 uses. Microsoft has admitted that there are memory leaks in VS 2008 that occur slowly. So until they fix it, the designer will have the same issue. If every few hours you close all your designers that you have open it will release significant amounts of memory back.
