Question

During Runtime I find that there is a very big memory usage by my application..

But It seems that I only use 3~4 MemoryStreams one of which is sometimes full of 81 Mb..

The others are mainly 20 mb, 3 mb and 1mb containers…

But still there is 525.xx MB memory usage by the application…

I tried using using(...) statements also but without any luck..

So, I am asking here for the most efficient way to cut down memory leaks.

Answer 1

In managed .NET apps, you don’t generally have memory “leaks” in the original sense of the word, unless you are allocating unmanaged resource handles and not disposing of them correctly. But that doesn’t sound like what you’re doing.

More likely is that you are holding on to references to objects that you no longer need, and this is keeping the memory “alive” longer than you are expecting.

For example, if you put 5MB of data into a memory stream, and then assign that memory stream to a static field, then the 5MB will never go away for the lifetime of the application. You need to assign null to the static field that refers to the memory stream when you no longer need what it points to so that the garbage collector will release and reclaim that 5MB of memory.

Similarly, local variables are not released until the function exits. If you allocate a lot of memory and assign it to a local variable, and then call another function that runs for hours, the local variable will be kept alive the whole time. If you don’t need that memory anymore, assign null to the local variable.

How are you determining that your app has a memory leak? If you are looking at the process virtual memory allocation shown by Task Manager, that is not very accurate. An application’s memory manager may allocate large chunks of memory from the OS and internally free them for other uses within the application without releasing them back to the OS.

Use common sense practices. Call dispose or close as appropriate and assign null to variables as soon as you no longer need their contents.

Just because the garbage collected environment will let you be lazy doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay attention to memory allocation and deallocation patterns in your code.