Garbage Collector Basics and Performance Hints

Summary: The .NET garbage collector provides a high-speed allocation service with good use of memory and no long-term fragmentation problems. This article explains how garbage collectors work, then goes on to discuss some of the performance problems that might be encountered in a garbage-collected environment. (10 printed pages)

Applies to:
  Microsoft® .NET Framework

Contents

Introduction
Simplified Model
Collecting the Garbage
Performance
Finalization
Conclusion

Introduction

In order to understand how to make good use of the garbage collector and what performance problems you might run into when running in a garbage-collected environment, it's important to understand the basics of how garbage collectors work and how those inner workings affect running programs.

This article is broken down into two parts: First I will discuss the nature of the common language runtime (CLR)'s garbage collector in general terms using a simplified model, and then I will discuss some performance implications of that structure.

Simplified Model

For explanatory purposes, consider the following simplified model of the managed heap. Note that this is not what is actually implemented.

Read more: MSDN

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