We have a situation where we are considering forcing a garbage collection on a server that is very low on RAM (3.6/4GB used on average). No, it’s not really an option to upgrade this server unfortunately.
One of our service processes (written indirectly in C++ (don’t ask…)) does work with the .NET components and then sleeps for 10 minutes. When that service is sleeping, it is often hanging on to 600MB of RAM that could be shared with other processes. Seems somehow related to WSE tracing being turned on for debugging. I can watch it wake up and GC on the next iteration on the first COM call to .NET – however then the process does some work and by the time it goes to sleep the RAM use is back up around 600MB… well, you can see where this goes…
The Question: I’m considering adding a garbage collection just before the process goes to sleep. There are other services on this box that are doing .NET related tasks. When I call a garbage collection in this service process, does that GC affect all other .NET related processes on the box or just the process that requests the collection? I’m a bit worried about creating some sort of performance problem for processes outside of the one I care about.
It will only affect the process that is calling GC.