Can I configure my C# application to limit its memory consumption to, say, 200MB?
IOW, I don't want to wait for the automatic GC (which seems to allow the heap to grow much more than actually needed by this application).
I know that in Java there's a command line switch you can pass to the JVM that achieves this.. is there an equivalent in C#?
p.s.
I know that I can invoke the GC from code, but that's something I would rather not have to do periodically. I'd rather set it once upon startup somehow and forget it.
I am not aware of any such options for the regular CLR. I would imagine that you can control this if you implement your own CLR host.
However, I disagree in your assessment of how the heap grows. The heap grows because your application is allocating and holding on to objects.
There are a couple of things you can do to limit the memory usage. Please see this question for some input: Reducing memory usage of .NET applications?
The memory manager lets the host
provide an interface through which the
CLR will request all memory
allocations. It replaces both the
Windows® memory APIs and the standard
C CLR allocation routines. Moreover,
the interface allows the CLR to inform
the host of the consequences of
failing a particular allocation (for
example, failing a memory allocation
from a thread holding a lock may have
certain reliability consequences). It
also permits the host to customize the
CLR's response to a failed allocation,
ranging from an OutOfMemoryException
being thrown all the way up through
the process being torn down. The host
can also use this manager to recapture
memory from the CLR by unloading
unused app domains and forcing garbage
collection. The memory manager
interfaces are listed in
Source and More : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163567.aspx#S2
Edit :
I actually wouldn't recommend you to manage memory by yourself, because more you get in, more problems you will probably run into, instead CLR does that mission perfectly.
But if you say it's very important for me to handle things on my own, then I can't anything.
I haven't tried this out, but you could attempt to call SetProcessWorkingSetSizeEx passing in the right flags to enforce that your process never gets more than so much memory. I don't know if the GC will take this into account and clean up more often, or if you'll just get OutOfMemoryExceptions.
