Question

Something's dogging my program

Asked by: ba272

Hi,

My C# program is almost ready to distribute but, now that I have run the program for longer than a few hours at a time, I've discovered that after a handful of hours, performance begins to drag badly.  I've built a performance metircs tool which helps me see the performance of a given function, and I've seen performance slow by about 10 times.  I plan on using my tool to look to see if there's a particular function to blame, but in the meantime, I'm wondering if there's a way to access the amount of available memory, so that I could log that information as the program runs.

Also, is there such thing as a memory leak in C#?  Are there bad coding practices which could cause system resources to become more scarse as time wears on?  I learned a long time ago to close file resources inside the finally block, but what other things might cause resources to become more scarce?

Thanks for the help.

Bob

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Asked On
2005-11-10 at 19:56:49ID21627278
Topic

C# Programming Language

Participating Experts
3
Points
500
Comments
4

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Answers

 

by: steelheart38Posted on 2005-11-11 at 01:50:55ID: 15272368

I'm always guilty of not disposing unused objects and sometimes manual garbage collection that hits performance sometimes

 

by: InteractiveMindPosted on 2005-11-11 at 05:35:06ID: 15273292

>> Also, is there such thing as a memory leak in C#?
Yes; there's a risk of memory leak in all languages - even those with automated garbage collection (such as C# and Java).

I've never ran into any serious leaks myself, but obvious things such as not closing streams, not reusing objects, and so on, all add up.

Here's a good .NET memory profiler:
http://www.scitech.se/memprofiler/
There's a trial version for it.

This too is supposed to be good:
http://www.automatedqa.com/products/aqtime/


As for retrieving the amount of memory allocated by your program, use the GC#GetTotalMemory(bool) method:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cpref/html/frlrfsystemgcclassgettotalmemorytopic.asp
..
"Retrieves the number of bytes currently thought to be allocated. A parameter indicates whether this method can wait a short interval before returning while the system collects garbage and finalizes objects."

 

by: smeggheadPosted on 2005-11-11 at 05:36:42ID: 15273304

If you are using GDI objects, such as Graphics, Fonts, Brushes, you should explicity call 'Dispose' on them as soon as you're done with them.

There is also a tool called CLR Profiler (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=86CE6052-D7F4-4AEB-9B7A-94635BEEBDDA&displaylang=en) which watches your application, and shows how many of certain types are used etc.. very useful.

hth
Smg.

 

by: ba272Posted on 2005-11-11 at 08:15:51ID: 15274594

Thanks a bunch.

Bob

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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