I honestly don't know. Would have to investigate.

I know that Access had memory leaks way back in the day, but so did every other database program it seamed.  And that form question (I did watch my memory handling in the task manager on one screen before I posted the question, as I couldn't really tell if stuff was or wasn't really freeing up or not.

Well the only way I can tell is to try looking at the amount of memory that the application uses in the task manager so let's give it a shot I'm going to open up a copy of the TechHelp free template and see what it says... OK brand new opened database with just the Main Menu is taking up 48.4 MB of memory.

Let's open up the CustomerF and it's up to 49.8 MB. Close the customer form, and it stays pretty much the same at 49.7. Open the CustomerListF and now we're up to 50.3. Opened up ContactF and we're up to 51.0 MB.

Now let's close all of those forms and wait... and it's staying at 50.8 MB. So it doesn't look like it frees up that memory from the open forms when you close them.

I'm going to try another database that's more intensive...

OK, I started up my 599cd database (the one that runs my business). With just the main menu open, it's consuming 81.4 MB of RAM. Let's do some stuff... this database has lots of linked tables, recordsets, arrays, and stuff that will eat memory. I'll do my morning routine (checking customer service emails, reviewing sales, etc.)

[Jeopardy song plays here]

Okay, so after working in the database for about 10 to 15 minutes doing my regular tasks like checking customer service, importing some data, etc., all that stuff, the database has ballooned to 120 MB, and I've closed all of the other objects that I opened. I'm back to just the main menu, so I can definitively say that Access is not freeing up the memory from all of the other forms and stuff that it opened. Now, could some of this be my fault? Could some of it be record sets that I didn't close and free up the memory or things like that? Sure, but I don't think it'd be that much stuff. And if a little tiny database like the TechHelp free template doesn't free up its memory, then I'm sure this monstrous gargantuan 20-year-old database is in no better shape.

So, this is one of the reasons why I advocate making sure you shut down and restart your database every night. If you've got something running on a server doing automated tasks and a loop, I recommend rebooting it at least daily. I reboot mine every hour. Sometimes you guys might hear in my videos the Star Trek transporter sound ' well, that's just the noise that my server makes on the top of the hour when it restarts the Access database because if I let it go for more than a day or two, I will start getting memory errors. So, thanks for the question, and yeah... looks like Access does not do a great job of freeing up memory from used objects.

Reboot often. Oh and backup, too... kids. :)

Access is not the most resource-intensive app nowadays.  The Internet browser with which you are reading this page probably consumes (way) more RAM than Access.  You can go to the task manager and sort by RAM usage and see which programs use the most RAM.  Windows alone have dozens of memory-resident programs and services that take up a chunk of RAM at startup.  In short, if you have enough RAM to run Windows, you have enough to run Access.

Indeed! But I know from experience, if I don't reboot my "server" database, I start getting weird errors and "out of memory" problems after a week-ish. So while Access isn't the biggest memory HOG on your system, it definitely doesn't do a good job of cleaning up after itself internally.

Access isn't really a server-class software.  For a program to run 24/7/365, it needs to run, and be designed to be run, on a server-class machine.  In my old job, we bought a $5k server PC for that purpose.  SQL Server is server-class, but it still needs to be run on an actual server to ensure 24/7/365 operation.  This is why businesses are moving to the cloud, because not many people are willing to buy and maintain their own servers, which is a second job in itself as I found out first-hand.

True. I've been running my "server" with Access on various versions of Windows (not Server) since 2002. I just have to make sure to restart the database every hour, and reboot Windows once a week. Aside from that, it runs just fine. Then again, I'm not running a Fortune 500 company either. And of course my sensitive data is stored in SQL Server, but the front-end is all Access.