String caching. Memory optimization and re-use

Question

I am currently working on a very large legacy application which handles a large amount of string data gathered from various sources (IE, names, identifiers, common codes relatin

Answer 1

You can acheive this using the built in .Net functionality.

When you initialise your string, make a call to string.Intern() with your string.

For example:

dataList.Add(string.Intern("AAAA"));

Every subsequent call with the same string will use the same reference in memory. So if you have 1000 AAAAs, only 1 copy of AAAA is stored in memory.