Anatomy of a “Memory Leak”

Question

In .NET perspective:

• What is a memory leak?
• How can you determine whether your application leaks? What are the effects?
• How can you prevent a

Answer 1

If you need to diagnose a memory leak in .NET, check these links:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163833.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc164138.aspx

Those articles describe how to create a memory dump of your process and how to analyze it so that you can first determine if your leak is unmanaged or managed, and if it is managed, how to figure out where it is coming from.

Microsoft also has a newer tool to assist with generating crash dumps, to replace ADPlus, called DebugDiag.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=28bd5941-c458-46f1-b24d-f60151d875a3&displaylang=en