When is it acceptable to call GC.Collect?

Question

The general advise is that you should not call GC.Collect from your code, but what are the exceptions to this rule?

I can only think of a few very specific cases where it may make sense to force a garbage collection.

One example that springs to mind is a service, that wakes up at intervals, performs some task, and then sleeps for a long time. In this case, it may be a good idea to force a collect to prevent the soon-to-be-idle process from holding on to more memory than needed.

Are there any other cases where it is acceptable to call GC.Collect?

Answer 1

You can call GC.Collect() when you know something about the nature of the app the garbage collector doesn't. It's tempting to think that, as the author, this is very likely. However, the truth is the GC amounts to a pretty well-written and tested expert system, and it's rare you'll know something about the low level code paths it doesn't.

The best example I can think of where you might have some extra information is a app that cycles between idle periods and very busy periods. You want the best performance possible for the busy periods and therefore want to use the idle time to do some clean up.

However, most of the time the GC is smart enough to do this anyway.

Answer 2

Have a look at this article by Rico Mariani. He gives two rules when to call GC.Collect (rule 1 is: "Don't"):

When to call GC.Collect()

Answer 3

one good reason for calling GC is on small ARM computers with little memory, like the Raspberry PI (running with mono). If unallocated memory fragments use too much of the system RAM, then the Linux OS can get unstable. I have an application where I have to call GC every second (!) to get rid of memory overflow problems.

Another good solution is to dispose objects when they are no longer needed. Unfortunately this is not so easy in many cases.

Answer 4

I use GC.Collect only when writing crude performance/profiler test rigs; i.e. I have two (or more) blocks of code to test - something like:

GC.Collect(GC.MaxGeneration, GCCollectionMode.Forced);
TestA(); // may allocate lots of transient objects
GC.Collect(GC.MaxGeneration, GCCollectionMode.Forced);
TestB(); // may allocate lots of transient objects
GC.Collect(GC.MaxGeneration, GCCollectionMode.Forced);
...

So that TestA() and TestB() run with as similar state as possible - i.e. TestB() doesn't get hammered just because TestA left it very close to the tipping point.

A classic example would be a simple console exe (a Main method sort-enough to be posted here for example), that shows the difference between looped string concatenation and StringBuilder.

If I need something precise, then this would be two completely independent tests - but often this is enough if we just want to minimize (or normalize) the GC during the tests to get a rough feel for the behaviour.

During production code? I have yet to use it ;-p

Answer 5

The best practise is to not force a garbage collection in most cases. (Every system I have worked on that had forced garbage collections, had underlining problems that if solved would have removed the need to forced the garbage collection, and speeded the system up greatly.)

There are a few cases when you know more about memory usage then the garbage collector does. This is unlikely to be true in a multi user application, or a service that is responding to more then one request at a time.

However in some batch type processing you do know more then the GC. E.g. consider an application that.

• Is given a list of file names on the command line
• Processes a single file then write the result out to a results file.
• While processing the file, creates a lot of interlinked objects that can not be collected until the processing of the file have complete (e.g. a parse tree)
• Does not keep match state between the files it has processed.

You may be able to make a case (after careful) testing that you should force a full garbage collection after you have process each file.

Another cases is a service that wakes up every few minutes to process some items, and does not keep any state while it’s asleep. Then forcing a full collection just before going to sleep may be worthwhile.

The only time I would consider forcing a collection is when I know that a lot of object had been created recently and very few objects are currently referenced.

I would rather have a garbage collection API when I could give it hints about this type of thing without having to force a GC my self.

See also "Rico Mariani's Performance Tidbits"

Answer 6

i am still pretty unsure about this. I am working since 7 years on an Application Server. Our bigger installations take use of 24 GB Ram. Its hightly Multithreaded, and ALL calls for GC.Collect() ran into really terrible performance issues.

Many third party Components used GC.Collect() when they thought it was clever to do this right now. So a simple bunch of Excel-Reports blocked the App Server for all threads several times a minute.

We had to refactor all the 3rd Party Components in order to remove the GC.Collect() calls, and all worked fine after doing this.

But i am running Servers on Win32 as well, and here i started to take heavy use of GC.Collect() after getting a OutOfMemoryException.

But i am also pretty unsure about this, because i often noticed, when i get a OOM on 32 Bit, and i retry to run the same Operation again, without calling GC.Collect(), it just worked fine.

One thing i wonder is the OOM Exception itself... If i would have written the .Net Framework, and i can't alloc a memory block, i would use GC.Collect(), defrag memory (??), try again, and if i still cant find a free memory block, then i would throw the OOM-Exception.

Or at least make this behavior as configurable option, due the drawbacks of the performance issue with GC.Collect.

Now i have lots of code like this in my app to "solve" the problem:

public static TResult ExecuteOOMAware<T1, T2, TResult>(Func<T1,T2 ,TResult> func, T1 a1, T2 a2)
{

    int oomCounter = 0;
    int maxOOMRetries = 10;
    do
    {
        try
        {
            return func(a1, a2);
        }
        catch (OutOfMemoryException)
        {
            oomCounter++;
            if (maxOOMRetries > 10)
            {
                throw;
            }
            else
            {
                Log.Info("OutOfMemory-Exception caught, Trying to fix. Counter: " + oomCounter.ToString());
                System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(oomCounter * 10));
                GC.Collect();
            }
        }
    } while (oomCounter < maxOOMRetries);

    // never gets hitted.
    return default(TResult);
}

(Note that the Thread.Sleep() behavior is a really App apecific behavior, because we are running a ORM Caching Service, and the service takes some time to release all the cached objects, if RAM exceeds some predefined values. so it waits a few seconds the first time, and has increased waiting time each occurence of OOM.)