.NET Blog

I Am a Happy Janitor – Part 1: Finding garbage

maoniAugust 18, 2006Aug 18, 200608/18/06

Indeed what I do is very much like the job of the janitors – like the ones who clean your building, or janitors you see at a food court, or yourself when you are taking care of garbage at your house. Doubtful you say? Let me prove it to you. Finding garbage What do you do when you are having lunch with your friends at a food court and ...

Suspending and resuming threads for GC

maoniJune 7, 2006Jun 7, 200606/7/06

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 ...

When memory is running low…

maoniJune 6, 2006Jun 6, 200606/6/06

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...

Large Object Heap

maoniApril 19, 2006Apr 19, 200604/19/06

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 ...

Workstation GC for server applications?

maoniMarch 1, 2006Mar 1, 200603/1/06

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...

Thank you all for your comments!

maoniFebruary 28, 2006Feb 28, 200602/28/06

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

What do you want to know?

maoniJanuary 9, 2006Jan 9, 200601/9/06

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 ...

So, what’s new in the CLR 2.0 GC?

maoniOctober 4, 2005Oct 4, 200510/4/05

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 ...

GC talk at the 2005 PDC

maoniJuly 27, 2005Jul 27, 200507/27/05

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 ...

Using GC Efficiently – Part 4

maoniMay 6, 2005May 6, 200505/6/05

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 ...