Name: Anonymous 2014-04-25 10:04
Listen to my story, folks. Yesterday I lost a C# programmer position due to the GC failure. My job was supporting a web service, which has code, allocating a huge chunk of memory, which persists, until the GC believe it need to free memory.
All wouldn't be that bad, but IIS provides a pool of concurrent processces (Application Pool), serving http-queries, where each process has own address space and a GC, unaware about the other processes. So each process may try to allocate whole computers's memory, before considering to garbage collect and release memory back to the system.
My decision was isolating the offending code into a separate process, which would do it's job, then die, immediately freeing the memory. Alas my boss disagreed with my decision, saying that I could have somehow hacked the vanilla dotNet GC into forcing it to free memory (GC.Collect doesn't guarantee anything and works only for objects having finalizers).
All wouldn't be that bad, but IIS provides a pool of concurrent processces (Application Pool), serving http-queries, where each process has own address space and a GC, unaware about the other processes. So each process may try to allocate whole computers's memory, before considering to garbage collect and release memory back to the system.
My decision was isolating the offending code into a separate process, which would do it's job, then die, immediately freeing the memory. Alas my boss disagreed with my decision, saying that I could have somehow hacked the vanilla dotNet GC into forcing it to free memory (GC.Collect doesn't guarantee anything and works only for objects having finalizers).