Steven Pratschner

Perhaps the most commonly asked questions regarding memory management in .NET are: "How long does a garbage collection take," and "How can I control when the garbage collector runs?" Apprehensive that "pauses" caused by garbage collections will be perceived by users, application developers often search for ways to control when garbage collections occur. Not surprisingly, the standard answer from Microsoft on these issues is to leave the collector to do its thing instead of trying to control it manually. Nevertheless, concern over garbage collection timing and performance remains. The single biggest factor in determining when a garbage collection occurs and how long it will take is the number of managed objects that your application allocates. Therefore understanding how many objects you allocate is the best way to determine how your application will be affected by ga... (more)

.NET Feature — The .NET Compact Framework Remote Performance Monitor

In the February issue of .NET Developers Journal, I described how implicit operations such as the boxing of value types can dramatically increase the amount of memory your .NET Compact Framework application uses. At the time, the tools available to help you get a picture of how your application uses memory were very limited. While version 2 of the Compact Framework did report performance statistics, it did so only when your application closed. The static nature of these counters made it very hard to locate memory usage trends in your application. What's needed instead is a tool ... (more)