Monogame Startup Memory Spike I am currently porting a game from WP7 using XNA to WP8.1 using MonoGame. I have been putting considerable effort into optimizing my game to be under the 185MB memory limit for low memory phones. I was making headway until I discovered a memory spike on startup. I continued to reduce the quality of my assets until the memory usage (while the game is running) is at about 140MB. However, on startup, the memory usage spikes to 205MB, sits there for about 10 seconds, and then drops to standard operating memory usage. It does this every time. Increasing or decreasing the asset sizes only changes how high the spike goes and the usage in general, but it does not change the 10 second delay at all. One idea I thought about was to delay the user with a longer splash screen, giving me time to load all the assets without blowing the hatch. But this seems to me like detracting from the user experience out of convenience. Any ideas? Has anyone else had this problem?