should I help Garbage Collector?

[Piotrek Stachowicz]

Hi,
[Windows Forms]
I have a panel in which I create lots of controls (a few hundreds,
this.panel1.Controls.Add(...) ) , but they are there only for a short
while - when user pushes button I call clear panel, and populate it with
another (brand new) set of controls.
Currently, I leave the cleaning job to GC, and just don't care, but
perhaps I could help him somehow?

Piotrek

 

[Simon Smith]

Hi,
[Windows Forms]
I have a panel in which I create lots of controls (a few hundreds,
this.panel1.Controls.Add(...) ) , but they are there only for a short
while - when user pushes button I call clear panel, and populate it with
another (brand new) set of controls.
Currently, I leave the cleaning job to GC, and just don't care, but
perhaps I could help him somehow?

Piotrek

You're much better off leaving it that way, probably. Make sure that you
unsubscribe from any events on the control's you're getting rid of, though.

 

[Guest]

No, sod it. The GC will love you - it will have a chance to execute its rarely-used-but-essential algorithms.
NEVER try to help the GC - it does a very complex job in a very elegant way - it is very sophisticated in its ways of not actually releasing memory if it's only going to be using it again in a short while, saving on a lot of processor time and memory allocation resources, giving it a 'managed memory pool', hence the term, managed. It is this sophisticated 'managed pooling' that gives .NET programs an advantage over raw C++ programs.

 

[AlexS]

Piotrek,

Profile your application with CLR Profiler or any other working for you and
see if there is need to help GC. Check relocated objects and time line. If
users are doing heavy input through this panel you might need to do certain
actions. But before doing anything check also recommendations in
http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnpag/html/scalenet.asp

HTH
Alex