XAMPP's MYSQL uses over 400MB of RAM

Question

I just installed a fresh copy of latest XAMPP and started Apache and MySQL. Checked the task manager and by default empty MySQL with no databases running eats up over 400MB of ram out of nowhere while not in use and when idling. E.g. it's stuck at 421.6MB.

So, just was wondering if this is supposed to be like that? Running on Win8 x64 Pro.

Answer 1

It's just not normal, it uses that much ram for nothing.. same on my system, with a DB with 4 tables and about ~30 records.

To significantly(!) lower the RAM usage, just add the following line to your config under

[mysqld]
table_definition_cache = 200

that should do the trick

(atleast it did for me, running XAMPP 1.8.3-2 MySQL 5.6.14)

Answer 2

Only 400 Mbytes? That's not much for a database and not much for a modern computer. You can fix the parameters to use more memory. If you are on a memory-limited device, you might consider the SQLite database.

More seriously, databases use lots of memory to increase performance. The code itself isn't small. Even with no data, databases reserve space for something called a page cache and for various other caches in memory. These get filled as they are used. Typically, you can set a threshold for total memory size, so the memory image will not grow bigger than a maximum, even when the data is much, much, much larger.

MySQL documentation does talk about memory usage here. Here is another article about memory usage.