Question

I have a program that is used to talk to hardware over rs232. This software is used to display a stream of data that is pushed over the rs232 from the hardware as fast as it can be. The problem I am running into is that over time the private memory assigned to the program explodes, and will very rapidly crash the program. If I disable the hardware from sending data for about 2 minutes, then the software can clear out the memory, but only if I pause the data stream.

I am using the DataReceived event from the SerialPort, and this appears to be where the problem is at, because it will cause a memory spike even if the DataReceived function does nothing inside it. The only thing I can come up with is that every time this event is raised it creates a new thread to run, and it is happening so fast that the computer doesn’t have time to run GC while the data is coming in.

Is there a more efficient way to pull data off a SerialPort object? I only care about a string when I receive a “NewLine”?

Thanks,

John Vickers

Answer 1

I developed a state-driven serial port programming language in C# and I believe it really solves nearly all of the serial port problems that everybody encounters with.

Would you please try it with the following simple state and check memory leaks ?

state Init
  recv();
  $len = length($DATA_PACKET);
  if("$len > 0") {
    log($DATA_PACKET, Debug);
  }
end state

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