Question

I coded a .NET C# windows service that runs on our server for a very long time (several months).

Yesterday i checked and i found out it uses 600MB of memory.
I Restarted the service and now it uses 60MB ram.

I’ve started to check why it is using so much memory.
Will the following function cause a memory leak?

I think its missing .Close() for StreamReader.

As a test , I’ve run the following function in a loop for 1000 times and i didn’t see the memory going up.

private static string GetTemplate(string queryparams)
{
    WebRequest request = HttpWebRequest.Create(uri);
    request.Method = WebRequestMethods.Http.Get;
    WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();
    StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());
    string tmp = reader.ReadToEnd();
    response.Close();
}

Answer 1

The code does not produce memory leak.

The code is not ideal as everyone points out (will cause closing resources later than you expect), but they will be released when GC get around to run and finalize unused objects.

Are you sure you see memory leak OR you just assume you have one based on some semi-random value? CLR may not free memory used by managed heap even if no objects are allocated, GC may not need to run if you don’t have enough memory pressure (especially in x64).