Question

I am experiencing memory leaks in an ASP.Net MVC 3 application and I suspect it may be an issue with the IoC container.

The MvcApplication creates a WindsorContainer object, populates it and then stores it in a static field like this:

public class MvcApplication : System.Web.HttpApplication, IContainerAccessor
{
  private static WindsorContainer container;

  protected void Application_Start()
  {
    ControllerBuilder.Current.SetControllerFactory(
      new WindsorControllerFactory(container));
  }
}

Is it correct here to hold on to the container in a static field? As far as I understand, the container itself only needs to live as long as the MVCApplication itself. Making it static would simply share it across multiple MVCApplication instances, so I wonder if it is being disposed incorrectly.

Answer 1

Container can be created this way and stored in the application object as a static field. You can control the lifetime of objects create by the container (see this page). For a web application the usual lifetime is per request – example copied from the aforementioned page:

Kernel.Register(
Component.For<ISession>()
    .UsingFactoryMethod(k => k.Resolve<ISessionFactory>().OpenSession())
    .LifestylePerWebRequest()
);

And in this case, you will never have to share it across multiple instances of MvcApplication class – there’s usually one implementation of HttpApplication class in web application.