Tools to analyzing the memory footprint of native DLLs and assemblies loaded in a process?

Question

I have a process holding 130MB of memory according to task manager, with only 11MB of live .NET objects according to dotTrace so I am wondering what\'s happening with the other

Answer 1

I recommend SciTech .NET Memory Profiler. The tool is primary aimed at profiling .NET memory usages, such as finding .NET memory leaks or identifying zones of heavy memory pressure. While not its main usage, it also has a simpler display of native memory, including JIT code size per loaded library. I'm sure you'll be able to find where those 120 MB come from with this kind of information.

Answer 2

I use RedGate ANTS .NET Developer Bundle for these issues. Memory Profiler allows to identify memory leaks (like zombies objects) and to make snapshots of memory usage. You'll then be able to compare classes and instances between two snapshots. You can track down instance reference in a tree and easily view the top object who maintain the reference.

Besides, Performance Profiler provides code profiling to identify bottlenecks and CPU usage.

For years now, it helped us alot to find application problems within minutes.

Answer 3

Since you mention sysinternals' ListDlls, there is another tool called Process Explorer that has tons of information, and is much much better than ListDlls (you want to make sure you have the latest versions that also has a lot of .NET information, supports 64-bit and 32-bit processes, etc.).

For each process, you can have a simultaneous views of unmanaged memory (private bytes et al.) and managed memory (GC collections, large object heap, etc.) displayed in columns or per process.

Another cool tool from sysinternals is VMMAP. It's a process memory analysis utility and shows a breakdown of different types of virtual and physical memory types.

As for you 120Mb question, you really want to check all unmanaged DLLs that are injected in your process and are not part of standard Windows installation or standard DLL set of processes. For such big size allocations, I would first track graphical components of course as they are notably known for allocation big chunks of memory (especially if you speak about a tool such as NDepend which is graphical). Process Explorer can also tracks the number of GDI and USER objects.

On the GDI topic, there is a free tool named GDIView available here that gives a details of GDI objects allocated per process.