What are the most common (and often overlooked) causes of memory leaks in managed (.net) applications?

Question

Please can anyone recommend a quick checklist / best practice guide to help us avoid simple (but subtle) mistakes that cause could cause memory leaks in .net apps

I find

Answer 1

The short answer is non-obvious references.

To add some details:

• Statics are not collected until AppDomain is collected (which may equal process shutdown)
• Events (remember to unsubscribe)
• Blocked finalizers (finalizers are run sequentially so any blocking finalizer will prevent all other finalizable objects from being collected). Example includes finalizers that can't get to a STA thread.
• Deadlocked thread will never release roots
• Forgetting to call Monitor.Exit() (e.g. when used with a timeout or across methods) may cause a deadlock which in turn may cause a leak