Best Practice for Forcing Garbage Collection in C#

Question

In my experience it seems that most people will tell you that it is unwise to force a garbage collection but in some cases where you are working with large objects that don\

Answer 1

One more thing, triggering GC Collect explicitly may NOT improve your program's performance. It is quite possible to make it worse.

The .NET GC is well designed and tuned to be adaptive, which means it can adjust GC0/1/2 threshold according to the "habit" of your program memory usage. So, it will be adapted to your program after some time running. Once you invoke GC.Collect explicitly, the thresholds will be reset! And the .NET has to spent time to adapt to your program's "habit" again.

My suggestion is always trust .NET GC. Any memory problem surfaces, check ".NET Memory" performance counter and diagnose my own code.

Answer 2

Suppose your program doesn't have memory leakage, objects accumulates and cannot be GC-ed in Gen 0 because: 1) They are referenced for long time so get into Gen1 & Gen2; 2) They are large objects (>80K) so get into LOH (Large Object Heap). And LOH doesn't do compacting as in Gen0, Gen1 & Gen2.

Check the performance counter of ".NET Memory" can you can see that the 1) problem is really not a problem. Generally, every 10 Gen0 GC will trigger 1 Gen1 GC, and every 10 Gen1 GC will trigger 1 Gen2 GC. Theoretically, GC1 & GC2 can never be GC-ed if there is no pressure on GC0 (if the program memory usage is really wired). It never happens to me.

For problem 2), you can check ".NET Memory" performance counter to verify whether LOH is getting bloated. If it is really a issue to your problem, perhaps you can create a large-object-pool as this blog suggests http://blogs.msdn.com/yunjin/archive/2004/01/27/63642.aspx.

Answer 3

Large objects are allocated on LOH (large object heap), not on gen 0. If you're saying that they don't get garbage-collected with gen 0, you're right. I believe they are collected only when the full GC cycle (generations 0, 1 and 2) happens.

That being said, I believe on the other side GC will adjust and collect memory more aggressively when you work with large objects and the memory pressure is going up.

It is hard to say whether to collect or not and in which circumstances. I used to do GC.Collect() after disposing of dialog windows/forms with numerous controls etc. (because by the time the form and its controls end up in gen 2 due to creating many instances of business objects/loading much data - no large objects obviously), but actually didn't notice any positive or negative effects in the long term by doing so.