C# thread or timer memory consumption

Question

I need to refresh label in my Winform application each 100 milisecond.
I used a timer control and have a problem with memory consumption.
After 20 minutes from start application, memory consumption increased by 100mb.

After replace timer by thread I have the same memory consumption effect.

It is any method to relese this memory?

Sam Hobbs · Answer

Use of Sleep in that manner is not good. That will prevent the UI from executing and to overcome that problem you are using Application.DoEvents(). A good solution is to use a timer as you did previously. Use of Sleep will certainly not enable the garbage collection to work. It is not clear to me that you need to do garbage collection. It might be that garbage collection is working adequately but Windows is not doing it's cleanup because it does not need to. Something I would do is while using the timer I would look at the processor utililization. If it is high then the problem might be that the processor is not fast enough to do the updates every 100 milliseconds.

Sebastian Rosinski · Answer

So tell me what is bad? private delegate void Delegacja(string text); ... Thread trd = new Thread(new ThreadStart(this.Engine)); trd.IsBackground = true; trd.Start(); ... private void Engine() { while (true) { nextIndex = -1; UpddateLabel(DateTime.Now.ToString()); System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(100); Application.DoEvents(); } } private void UpddateLabel(string text) { if (this.label7.InvokeRequired) { this.label7.Invoke(new Delegacja(UpddateLabel) new object[] { text }); } else { label7.Text = text; } }

Sam Hobbs · Answer

Proper use of the timer would make Application.DoEvents() unnecessary.

Sebastian Rosinski · Answer

I found solution. Because timer control's interval or sleep time was 100 mili second application can't take all events like let free memory. Just need to add extortion to do all events. Application.DoEvents(); Simple solution are best. thanks guys Best regards

Sam Hobbs · Answer

The first question should be what is the problem. Windows is designed to not clean things up if it does not need to. If Windows does not need the memory then it might choose to not free unused memory. Your application might be freeing it but Windows might not bother to free it from it's list of allocated memory.

Vulpes · Answer

For some reason I haven't been able to load it properly but I did manage to look at the timer1_Tick eventhandler and you certainly don't want these lines at the end: timer1.Dispose(); timer1.Start();

Sebastian Rosinski · Answer

So memory profiler is a new for me :( Maby You can find solution? This is my project in VS2010. Net 2.0 just run this without debug mode and look at task manager.

Vulpes · Answer

I'd try using a memory profiler to see if you can find the problem. There's a free 14 day trial of this one ( http://memprofiler.com/ ).

Sebastian Rosinski · Answer

Thanks for reply but GC.Collect() doesn't help me. I call this every minute next every 5 minutes next call by button. Problem still exist.

Muralidharan Deenathayalan · Answer

These links may help you http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3869862/memory-usage-during-update-label-with-system-windows-forms-timer-control http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tess/archive/2008/04/17/how-does-the-gc-work-and-what-are-the-sizes-of-the-different-generations.aspx

Vulpes · Answer

You're creating a lot of temporary strings in the background. I'd see if it makes any difference if you call GC.Collect() every minute or so.

Sebastian Rosinski · Answer

label.text=DateTime.Now.ToLongTimeString();

Muralidharan Deenathayalan · Answer

How you're getting the data for the label to refresh it? If you're accessing database call/any data manipulation check that first whether it is releasing the memory properly.