Hi All

A Show Stopper problem in our application

we have a DLL which exposes some objects collections in terms of get and
set properties. The objects have very heavy memory footprints (beyond 2gb)
we want to have the funcionality that if the memory usage goes beyond a
certain threshold limit we persist the content of these objects in hard disk
and destroy them to free up the memory.


Problem is, the instance to these objects will be created in the
Applications using this component. Can we free up the memory by destroying
these objects even if they are being refrenced from the client application?


Any Leads / Suggestions are most welcome

Regards,

Manish

Manish,
I would consider using a variation the Lazy Load Pattern with Weak
References (System.WeakReference).

http://www.martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/lazyLoad.html

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...ClassTopic.asp

There are both short & long weak references. Not sure which will work better
for you.

My concern is: Does the app create these objects or just consume? Generally
a Weak Reference is used to allow the object to be discarded at the
discretion of the GC, if the object is dirty you do not want the object
discarded. Of course you could be 'check points' in your object, the app
builds part of the object, calls a check point to save, builds some more,
save some more...

Hope this helps
Jay

"Manish Parikh" <parikh__manish (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> wrote

Hi Manish,

If you want to know more about what WeakReferences are, the following two-part article gives a very good explanation of the
Garbage Collector, including WeakReferences.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/1100/gci/
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/1200/GCI2/

Regards,
Fergus

[Taken from your Object Life Cycle post in csharp, Jay. Thanks - it was a useful read.]

Hi Manish,

I would certainly hope not. At least not without informing the client application in some way. Is there anyway that your apps
can negotiate the destruction of an object?

Regards,
Fergus