Miscellaneous Utilities : VMMAP empty working set potential problems?

 

I'm an ASP.NET developer working on a machine with 8 Gigs of RAM.  When I'm working, I have everything (Visual Studio, IIS, SQL Server, etc.) running on my local machine.  When I get over 90% Physical Usage my system gets pretty sluggish.  According to Sys Internals Process Explorer I see several processes that seem to accumulate more and more in their Private Bytes/Working set as they run.  One of these processes is sqlserver.exe. 

 

It was well over 1 Gig of RAM a few minutes ago and I tried the Empty Working set command in VMMap and I got back almost a  Gig of available RAM, sweet.  This could save me a lot of reboots, but I'm wondering what the downside to doing this.  I would assume that this is basically flushing Sql Server's memory cache, etc. so that the next time it needs some information that was in it's Working Set it'll just read it from disk again.  If so, I'm totally okay with it as I'll take that performance hit over having my Physical Usage at  >90% any day. 

 

I see that the devenv.exe's (Visual Studio 2010) working bytes seem to grow and grow over time, even when I stop debugging and close a bunch of files, it never seems to free any memory.  I wonder what would happen if I empty it's working set, I've been restarting it, but that takes a bit of time to get back where I was at.

 

-Eric