Question

Silly question, but in a winforms app Im currently working on, I would like to get the amount of bytes allocated/used by a List<[SomeObject]> held in memory (for statistical purposes). Is this possible? I have searched thru the possible options, but there is obviously no myList.GetTotalBytes() method.

Answer 1

I’m not sure the runtime provides a reliable programmatic method of getting an object’s size, however there are some options open to you:

• use a tool like CLR Profiler
• use Marshal.SizeOf() (returns the unmanaged size of the object)
• serialize your object to binary for an approximation