Question

If you stick to managed code and standard coding (nothing that does unconventional things withe CLR) in .NET, is there any reason to manually invoke the GC or request to run finalizers on unreferenced objects?

The reason I ask is thaty I have an app that grows huge in Working Memory set. I’m wondering if calling

System.GC.Collect();

and

System.GC.RunFinalizers();

would help, and if it would force anything that wouldn’t be done by the CLR normally anyways.

Answer 1

No, it won’t help. Don’t do it. The CLR already handles all the memory management-related stuff in a fine way, and no explicit call will do something it’s not already doing.

Try to look for memory leaks in your program: while .NET languages are memory-managed, it doesn’t mean it always knows when you’re not using a certain object anymore. For instance, objects attached as event listeners to other objects are considered rooted by the GC and won’t be collected.

You can try SOS to seek leaks.

If there is really no leak, then your program truly needs the memory it has.