Is there a way to retrieve a C# app's current

Question

I am automating some profiling tasks and want to log heap space and generation sizes real-time. The profiling API seems awfully complicated for what I need, and it seems to listen in on individual allocations and collections, which isn't that important to me. Profiling tools are a great help of course, but I was looking for a more flexible, programmable interface.

Answer 1

The term 'current memory usage' is a little loosely defined. Do you mean the working set? Whatever it means, you can use different properties such as VirtualMemorySize, WorkingSet, PrivateMemorySize, etc. from the process class to retrieve it.

long workingSet = System.Diagnostics.Process.GetCurrentProcess().WorkingSet64;

Answer 2

Once I had to find a memory leak in a legacy code, I came accross this solution: Start "tasklist" with appropriate parameters as a process and read the output either from stream or from file.

e.g.

tasklist /fi "IMAGENAME eq notepad++.exe" /FO CSV /NH

Output is:

"notepad++.exe","7132","Console","1","21.004 K"

Not that elegant, but works in any programming language on Windows without additional dependences (C++/Qt in my case).

Answer 3

There are performance counters for a lot of this stuff and if you can't use Perfmon, you can access counters through the Diagnostics API.