Question

I have a WCF service (instantiated within a Console application on NetTCP), this service has static data (large volume) which gets instantiated on the load.

I have multiple instances of this Console application running at once, and all of them are doing the same static data initialization , is there a way that I can have a single data source and share the data among processes so that each process does not have to consume large amount of memory?

Answer 1

You can use memory mapped files; but each process must have its own memory due to how Windows protects applications.

From http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd997372.aspx:

Non-persisted files are memory-mapped files that are not associated with a file on a disk. When the last process has finished working with the file, the data is lost and the file is reclaimed by garbage collection. These files are suitable for creating shared memory for inter-process communications (IPC).

With any sort of “shared” data, you’ll have the additional task of synchronizing access.