Recently, I was checking the memory usage of a server running several ASP.NET Core applications.

Nothing had crashed. The applications were running fine. But memory utilization was higher than I would have liked, and it got me thinking about whether I could make better use of the server's resources.

I've been working with C# and ASP.NET for years, mostly building APIs, database-driven applications, and Angular frontends. My usual stack is ASP.NET Core, SQL Server, and Entity Framework Core.

So naturally, I started looking at .NET Native AOT.

I'd heard about the smaller executables, faster startup times, and lower memory requirements.…