Is correct to use GC.Collect(); GC.WaitForPendingF

Question

I've started to review some code in a project and found something like this:

GC.Collect();
GC.WaitForPendingFinalizers();

Those lines usually appear on methods that are conceived to destruct the object under the rationale of increase efficiency. I've made this remarks:

1. To call garbage collection explicitly on the destruction of every object decreases performance because doing it has not into account if it is absolutely necessary for the CLR performance.
2. Calling those instructions in that order causes every object to be destroyed only if other objects are being finalized. Therefore, an object that could be destroyed independently has to wait for other object's destruction without a real necessity.
3. It can generate a deadlock (see: this question)

Are 1, 2 and 3 true? Can you give some reference supporting your answers?

Although I'm almost sure about my remarks, I need to be clear in my arguments in order to explain to my team why is this a problem . That's the reason I'm asking for confirmation and reference.

Answer 1

I've used this just once: to clean up server-side cache of Crystal Report documents. See my response in Crystal Reports Exception: The maximum report processing jobs limit configured by your system administrator has been reached

The WaitForPendingFinalizers was particularly helpful for me, as sometimes the objects were not being cleaned up properly. Considering the relatively slow performance of the report in a web page - any minor GC delay was negligible, and the improvement in memory management gave an overall happier server for me.

Answer 2

We have run into similar problems to @Grzenio however we are working with much larger 2-dimensional arrays, in the order of 1000x1000 to 3000x3000, this is in a webservice.

Adding more memory isn't always the right answer, you have to understand your code and the use case. Without GC collecting we require 16-32gb of memory (depending on customer size). Without it we would require 32-64gb of memory and even then there are no guarantees the system won't suffer. The .NET garbage collector is not perfect.

Our webservice has an in-memory cache in the order of 5-50 million string (~80-140 characters per key/value pair depending on configuration), in addition with each client request we would construct 2 matrices one of double, one of boolean which were then passed to another service to do the work. For a 1000x1000 "matrix" (2-dimensional array) this is ~25mb, per request. The boolean would say which elements we need (based on our cache). Each cache entry represents one "cell" in the "matrix".

The cache performance dramatically degrades when the server has > 80% memory utilization due to paging.

What we found is that unless we explicitly GC the .net garbage collector would never 'cleanup' the transitory variables until we were in the 90-95% range by which point the cache performance had drastically degraded.

Since the down-stream process often took a long duration (3-900 seconds) the performance hit of a GC collection was neglible (3-10 seconds per collect). We initiated this collect after we had already returned the response to the client.

Ultimately we made the GC parameters configurable, also with .net 4.6 there are further options. Here is the .net 4.5 code we used.

if (sinceLastGC.Minutes > Service.g_GCMinutes)
{
     Service.g_LastGCTime = DateTime.Now;
     var sw = Stopwatch.StartNew();
     long memBefore = System.GC.GetTotalMemory(false);
     context.Response.Flush();
     context.ApplicationInstance.CompleteRequest();
     System.GC.Collect( Service.g_GCGeneration, Service.g_GCForced ? System.GCCollectionMode.Forced : System.GCCollectionMode.Optimized);
     System.GC.WaitForPendingFinalizers();
     long memAfter = System.GC.GetTotalMemory(true);
     var elapsed = sw.ElapsedMilliseconds;
     Log.Info(string.Format("GC starts with {0} bytes, ends with {1} bytes, GC time {2} (ms)", memBefore, memAfter, elapsed));
}

After rewriting for use with .net 4.6 we split the garbage colleciton into 2 steps - a simple collect and a compacting collect.

    public static RunGC(GCParameters param = null)
    {
        lock (GCLock)
        {
            var theParams = param ?? GCParams;
            var sw = Stopwatch.StartNew();
            var timestamp = DateTime.Now;
            long memBefore = GC.GetTotalMemory(false);
            GC.Collect(theParams.Generation, theParams.Mode, theParams.Blocking, theParams.Compacting);
            GC.WaitForPendingFinalizers();
            //GC.Collect(); // may need to collect dead objects created by the finalizers
            var elapsed = sw.ElapsedMilliseconds;
            long memAfter = GC.GetTotalMemory(true);
            Log.Info($"GC starts with {memBefore} bytes, ends with {memAfter} bytes, GC time {elapsed} (ms)");

        }
    }

    // https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.runtime.gcsettings.largeobjectheapcompactionmode.aspx
    public static RunCompactingGC()
    {
        lock (CompactingGCLock)
        {
            var sw = Stopwatch.StartNew();
            var timestamp = DateTime.Now;
            long memBefore = GC.GetTotalMemory(false);

            GCSettings.LargeObjectHeapCompactionMode = GCLargeObjectHeapCompactionMode.CompactOnce;
            GC.Collect();
            var elapsed = sw.ElapsedMilliseconds;
            long memAfter = GC.GetTotalMemory(true);
            Log.Info($"Compacting GC starts with {memBefore} bytes, ends with {memAfter} bytes, GC time {elapsed} (ms)");
        }
    }

Hope this helps someone else as we spent a lot of time researching this.

Answer 3

There is a point one can make that is very easy to understand: Having GC run automatically cleans up many objects per run (say, 10000). Calling it after every destruction cleans up about one object per run.

Because GC has high overhead (needs to stop and start threads, needs to scan all objects alive) batching calls is highly preferable.

Also, what good could come out of cleaning up after every object? How could this be more efficient than batching?

Answer 4

Your point number 3 is technically correct, but can only happen if someone locks during a finaliser.

Even without this sort of call, locking inside a finaliser is even worse than what you have here.

There are a handful of times when calling GC.Collect() really does help performance.

So far I've done so 2, maybe 3 times in my career. (Or maybe about 5 or 6 times if you include those where I did it, measured the results, and then took it out again - and this is something you should always measure after doing).

In cases where you're churning through hundreds or thousands of megs of memory in a short period of time, and then switching over to much less intensive use of memory for a long period of time, it can be a massive or even vital improvement to explicitly collect. Is that what's happening here?

Anywhere else, they're at best going to make it slower and use more memory.

Answer 5

See my other answer here:

To GC.Collect or not?

two things can happen when you call GC.Collect() yourself: you end up spending more time doing collections (because the normal background collections will still happen in addition to your manual GC.Collect()) and you'll hang on to the memory longer (because you forced some things into a higher order generation that didn't need to go there). In other words, using GC.Collect() yourself is almost always a bad idea.

About the only time you ever want to call GC.Collect() yourself is when you have specific information about your program that is hard for the Garbage Collector to know. The canonical example is a long-running program with distinct busy and light load cycles. You may want to force a collection near the end of a period of light load, ahead of a busy cycle, to make sure resources are as free as possible for the busy cycle. But even here, you might find you do better by re-thinking how your app is built (ie, would a scheduled task work better?).

Answer 6

The short answer is: take it out. That code will almost never improve performance, or long-term memory use.

All your points are true. (It can generate a deadlock; that does not mean it always will.) Calling GC.Collect() will collect the memory of all GC generations. This does two things.

• It collects across all generations every time - instead of what the GC will do by default, which is to only collect a generation when it is full. Typical use will see Gen0 collecting (roughly) ten times as often than Gen1, which in turn collects (roughly) ten times as often as Gen2. This code will collect all generations every time. Gen0 collection is typically sub-100ms; Gen2 can be much longer.

• It promotes non-collectable objects to the next generation. That is, every time you force a collection and you still have a reference to some object, that object will be promoted to the subsequent generation. Typically this will happen relatively rarely, but code such as the below will force this far more often:

  void SomeMethod()
  { 
   object o1 = new Object();
   object o2 = new Object();
  
   o1.ToString();
   GC.Collect(); // this forces o2 into Gen1, because it's still referenced
   o2.ToString();
  }
  

Without a GC.Collect(), both of these items will be collected at the next opportunity. With the collection as writte, o2 will end up in Gen1 - which means an automated Gen0 collection won't release that memory.

It's also worth noting an even bigger horror: in DEBUG mode, the GC functions differently and won't reclaim any variable that is still in scope (even if it's not used later in the current method). So in DEBUG mode, the code above wouldn't even collect o1 when calling GC.Collect, and so both o1 and o2 will be promoted. This could lead to some very erratic and unexpected memory usage when debugging code. (Articles such as this highlight this behaviour.)

EDIT: Having just tested this behaviour, some real irony: if you have a method something like this:

void CleanUp(Thing someObject)
{
    someObject.TidyUp();
    someObject = null;
    GC.Collect();
    GC.WaitForPendingFinalizers(); 
}

... then it will explicitly NOT release the memory of someObject, even in RELEASE mode: it'll promote it into the next GC generation.