I’m using a progress bar in a small WPF application I’m working on and noticed that the Private Working Set for my application seemed higher than I expected.

My application, once simplified down to it’s most basic element, consisted of:

Window, Grid, ProgressBar

On my Windows 7 x64 machine, running the application uses around 29MB (private working set).

Removing the animation only from the visual template drops the private working set to 19MB.

So, it appears that the animation alone causes an extra 10MB of private working set to be needed. Sorry, but that’s crazy (especially for my application)!

If anyone has any specific theories – speak up! Here’s the basic starting Window I created:

<Window
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    xmlns:Microsoft_Windows_Themes="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Windows.Themes;assembly=PresentationFramework.Aero" x:Class="PerfProgressBar.Window1"
    Title="Window1" Height="300" Width="300">
    <Grid>
        <ProgressBar x:Name="progressBar1" Value="100" />
    </Grid>
</Window>

I’m not going to post the entire ProgressBar template, but if you want to reproduce the problem (and see how the animation impacts the memory requirements, just comment out the “Animation” rectangle in the control template (and in the trigger as well):

<Rectangle x:Name="Animation" Fill="{TemplateBinding Foreground}" Grid.ColumnSpan="3" Grid.RowSpan="2">
    <Rectangle.OpacityMask>
        <MultiBinding>
            <MultiBinding.Converter>
                <Microsoft_Windows_Themes:ProgressBarHighlightConverter/>
            </MultiBinding.Converter>
            <Binding Source="{StaticResource ProgressBarIndicatorAnimatedFill}"/>
            <Binding Path="ActualWidth" ElementName="Background"/>
            <Binding Path="ActualHeight" ElementName="Background"/>
        </MultiBinding>
    </Rectangle.OpacityMask>
</Rectangle>

<Trigger Property="IsIndeterminate" Value="false">
    <Setter Property="Fill" TargetName="Animation" Value="#80B5FFA9"/>
</Trigger>

Apparently, the ProgressBarHighlightConverter is intense (a little double checking in Reflector confirms!).

(All animations have some price of course – as an experiment I rotated the progressbar in a storyboard and that used about 7MB).

The moral of the story here really is to make sure you do some sanity checks against your [fill-in-the-blank] technology so that you understand how it uses system resources such as memory, CPU, etc, as it may have an impact on the success or failure of your application. I’ll leave out the gratuitous animations in my application so it doesn’t use memory unnecessarily.

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