Just create an instrument track with Halion Sonic SE, then delete the track
It doesn’t free the virtual memory. All the other plugins do it.
By the way, I wonder why it take so much memory with no samples loaded… what a waste of resources!
I deleted Halion once. Played hell with my memory. Forgot the wife’s birthday. 
Rolling pin for dinner.
You mention virtual memory. I’m wondering how you kow. On modern hard drives it should be negligible.
I know with process explorer from sysinternals,I’m trying to track what the hell is going on with the memory.
Lately I’m barely able to work with Cubase, it takes too much memory for just anything. I have 2 gb of RAM at work and until the last version I’ve been capable of working reasonably well, but now… Hell, I can’t even load the demo project of Cubase 6.5! At this rate I’ll have to stop upgrading.
The system is completely clean with no background applications or services, not even mail or web browser when working.
If you are talking about “Standby” memory increase, that is normal with Windows 7. Try loading another instance of HS and load the exact same patch - it should load much quicker. It’s a W7 caching feature. You’ll see W7 caching in the background and Standby mem usage would increase, up until it can’t go any further if you are loading a lot of samples. Standby memory would get released as you need, and you won’t see a performance hit from it.
I’m talking about process memory, not system memory or cache.
2 gig of ram I’d say isn’t near enough these days especially for things like Halion. And RAM is not “virtual memory”.
It takes so much memory because it’s an APP like Cubase. Apps need memory.
Where are you getting the readings for this “virtual memory” from?
And how would you define “huge” please?
…
Every application in Windows uses virtual memory, that’s how it works. One instance of the Halion Sonic SE plugin leaves about 279 mega reserved in Cubase’s virtual memory after being removed. The rest of the plugins I tried, including Halion 4, release all their memory after being removed.
And I’ll change the topic and leave it here.
Cheers!
Clear up:
Straight from windows help:
"What is virtual memory?
If your computer lacks the random access memory (RAM) needed to run a program or operation, Windows uses virtual memory to compensate. To find out how much RAM your computer has, see Find out how much RAM your computer has.
Virtual memory combines your computer’s RAM with temporary space on your hard disk. When RAM runs low, virtual memory moves data from RAM to a space called a paging file. Moving data to and from the paging file frees up RAM so your computer can complete its work.
The more RAM your computer has, the faster your programs will generally run. If a lack of RAM is slowing your computer, you might be tempted to increase virtual memory to compensate. However, your computer can read data from RAM much more quickly than from a hard disk, so adding RAM is a better solution."
So: virtual memory is hard drive space that windows uses when you DON’T HAVE ENOUGH RAM. If you have enough RAM, windows doesn’t use virtual memory. It’ll stay there until it’s overridden, but it’s not a “memory leak”.
You checked the simple and outdated explanation, that’s not how it works in Windows 7 and XP.
Check this one instead:
http://members.shaw.ca/bsanders/WindowsGeneralWeb/RAMVirtualMemoryPageFileEtc.htm
“In most modern operating systems, including Windows, application programs and many system processes always reference memory using virtual memory addresses which are automatically translated to real (RAM) addresses by the hardware. Only core parts of the operating system kernel bypass this address translation and use real memory addresses directly. The virtual memory management component of the operating system maintains the tables used by the hardware to provide the mapping of virtual addresses into real addresses. A small amount of RAM is used by those parts of the operating system that can not be paged out (for example, the virtual memory manager) and is thus not available for assignment to virtual memory.
The key point here is that Virtual Memory is always in use, even when the memory required by all running processes does not exceed the amount of RAM installed on the system.”
With the right tool you can see how the physical and virtual memory is used in the system. I know this because I’m a programmer myself. Please stop trying to make me wrong unless you know exactly what you’re talking about.
This was a report intended for Steinberg’s programmers. I must apologize for being so vague in my initial description.
Cheers