FreeAllUnusedJunk() ? any such method?

FreeAllUnusedJunk() ? any such method?

• joshua926

  So why wouldn't you recommend calling the gc.Collect() I want to use it in my application.
  

• lawhornk

  its bad practice and should leave the GC to do its own thing without interferring with it otherwise sometimes you will have undesirable effects
  
  

• OniShiro

  still wouldn't recommend calling GC yourself.
  
  

• Williamq

  Definitely will be different behavior. GC works really tight with free memory. It will start more often when free memory is really low.
  I suggest to test your code with FxCop, maybe will help you find some better cleanup solution.
  
  

• pierreg

  Thanks. I suppose I'll just leave it to my app to garbage collect. Probably the only reason it saw fit to cap off at 300MB'ish is because I have 2GB RAM and plenty available. I'm sure on a machine with only 512MB RAM or so, it would've done the garbage collect a lot sooner. (right I hope) :)
  
  

• Mateus1223

  best practice would be to enclose in the using {} statement, the disposible objects which will try to be automatically freed up/disposed of but no guarentee it will at the time of the call. Example, streams:

  using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(file))

  { ... do stuff ... }

   

   

   

  
  
  

• Marie-Thérèse

  Hi,

  Well, NO
  there is no such method which takes the memory count from where it began. Even I was wondering why .NET consumes memory and never frees it.
  Take a form for example and put a button on it. Now, on this button click do something like this.

  using(TextBox tb = new TextBox()) { }
  What we expect from this code is that on each click the memory goes up and comes down to some level, but it dosen't. You'll notice that the memory keeps increasing, (maybe in small amount but still) and never gets to the point where it started. Well, this is because the Textbox() object is Disposed but not freed. Acceptable, yet it should show some sign of freeing the objects if I click 100 times.

  We cannot expect a +20KB on new object goes back to -20KB when an object is Disposed(). Whatever +8KB(or so) is left keeps increasing the used memory count. But once it reaches the pressure limit, GC frees it. You can also increse the memory pressure manuall by using AddMemoryPressure call to GC.

  regards

  
  

• chakravarthy_b

  Yes, there is.. GC.Collect() will run a garbage collection for you. The (good) advice is not to run it yourself - instead, let the GC run when memory pressure and system availability trigger an automatic collection - this will let the GC tune itself. If your app is using 300MB, but no one else needs it, who cares!

  Of course, there's always a time when you (the developer) know better than the GC... so GC.Collect is there for you. You can specify a generation or let it do a full collection. But remember - people used to think they could optimize better than a good compiler, and now those optimizations just get in the way. The GC is fair now and will get better and better, so keep that in mind :)

  
  
• FreeAllUnusedJunk() ? any such method?