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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-22T19:04:47+00:00

I’m having a WinForms performance issue that might be related to the fact that

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I’m having a WinForms performance issue that might be related to the fact that I dynamically add and then remove hundreds of controls.

EDIT {
The application displays a timeline which consists of controls representing historical events. Controls are added, removed or moved, depending on the time you jump to. The performance issues are not only during the addition and removal of controls (this I can live with), but even after I jump to a time with no historical events (meaning no controls are currently displayed). After jumping around and getting to a time where there are no events on the timeline, some activities in the GUI still take a long amount of time to complete, such as opening menus or opening dialog boxes. The strange thing is that other GUI activities, such as pressing buttons, do not stall. }

Although the memory consumption is perfectly stable, can it still be that there is an issue with freeing resources?

In order to remove a control, I do two things:

  1. Unregister callbacks from all events,
  2. Call containerPanel.Controls.Remove(control).

Thanks!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You might have trouble due to GC pressure, that is that the garbage collector is running often due to many objects beeing created and then freed. when the GC runs all threads are stopped in their tracks (almost) and the app looks like its freezing

    i dont think you’re doing anything wrong with your removal code, but perhaps you can cache the controls somehow? can you tell us a bit more about you scenario?

    -edit-

    Based on your scenario, i’d suggest sidestepping the whole issue with removing controls and adding new ones and if possible reusing the controls that are already in the view, but switching out their data contexts (binding them to diffrent data) when the view changes. In wpf a common name for this approach is UI-virtualization but it can be applied to any ui framework, at least in principle

    Another way around the problem might be to have empty place holder controls for the for all the positions in the timeline that you can scroll to immediately and then add content to as its loaded from disk or whereever. That way you would not have to affect the layout of the whole time line, you’d just fill in the particular slot the user is viewing. This would be even more effective if all the time-line-event-controls are all the same size, then the layout of the entire timeline would be completley unaffected)

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