First of all, suspension and resumption of threads is not really part of the GC. GC calls functions to do the suspension and the resumption as a service provided in the CLR. Other components in the CLR also use this service such as the debugger implementation. But it’s true that suspending and resuming because of the GC is the most significant usag...

When I say memory I mean physical memory. Let’s assume that you have enough virtual memory space. When the physical memory gets low you may start getting OOMs or start paging. You can experiment and see how you can avoid getting into the low memory situation but sometimes it’s hard to predict and hard to test all scenarios your app can get into. Fo...

LOH (Large Object Heap) contains objects that are 85,000 bytes or bigger (there’s also some objects that are less than 85,000 bytes that are allocated on the LOH by the runtime itself but usually they are very small and we’ll ignore them for this discussion).   The way LOH is implemented changed dramatically from 1.0 to 1.1. In 1.0 we used a ...

In Using GC Efficiently – Part 2 I talked about different flavors of GC that exist in the CLR and how you choose which flavor is good for your applications, and I said that the Server GC flavor is designed for server applications. As with any performance tuning there are always exceptions – there’s no one-rule-fits-all. Recently I worked with an in...

I will write about the things you asked in my last blog entry's comments in the next few blog entries.

In my previous Using GC Efficiently entries I've basically covered all the big areas of GC in the CLR. There are of course a lot of things to write about GC but I want to keep GC users as my target audience, not GC designers/implementors. So I would really like to hear from you - our customers of the .NET Framework - if you have specific ...

Certainly that’s one of the most frequently asked questions I get (at the PDC too!). So since PDC already happened I can tell the rest of you about the new stuff happened in GC in CLR 2.0. The slides can be downloaded here. And I will be referring to some of the slides. I must apologize for your having to click on the link to see the slide each tim...

I will be giving a GC talk at the PDC this September. This talk is to give you a close up view of the CLR GC so I hope to see all you hard core .NET developers there! I will talk about some internal details of generations, allocations, different flavors of GC and fragmentation (what we have done in the GC and what you can do in your applications t...

In this article I’ll talk about things you want to look for when you look at the managed heap in your applications to determine if you have a healthy heap. I’ll touch on some topics related to large heaps and the implications you want to be aware of when you have an application that maintains or has potential for the need to maintain a managed heap...

In this article I’ll talk about pinning and weak references – stuff related to GC handles.   (I was planning on talking about finalization in this part of the “Using GC Efficiently” series but since I already covered it in pretty much detail in one of my previous blog entries I won’t repeat it here. Feel free to ask if you have questions not a...