WPF memory leak

Question

I have a simple wpf application. In main window i have stack panel and 2 buttons. First button adds 100 my user controls (without any data bindings, events, bitmaps), and se

Answer 1

In a garbage collected environment, releasing memory immediately doesn't really make sense.

Since the CLR JITs code on demand, the first time you run your test you shouldn't see memory drop back to where it was initially. This makes sense because new code paths have been followed and code has been JITted. That code needs to reside somewhere in memory no?

Therefore, after your first test run, you shouldn't be able to collect back down to your initial memory footprint. Your baseline should be the memory usage you get after running the test once, not before. After running a second time, I am able to get memory back down to the baseline with a number of collections.

Also, I'd recommend running your project in release mode with no debugger attached. Running your program with a debugger attached will not show you a true memory profile, as there are various tricks it employs to keep objects around (e.g. Collect objects still in scope - GC.Collect).

This is all a moot point, however, because like I said above, reclaiming memory immediately doesn't make much sense in a GC environment (in most cases).