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 speci

Answer 1

I was doing some performance testing on array and list:

private static int count = 100000000;
private static List GetSomeNumbers_List_int()
{
    var lstNumbers = new List();
    for(var i = 1; i <= count; i++)
    {
        lstNumbers.Add(i);
    }
    return lstNumbers;
}
private static int[] GetSomeNumbers_Array()
{
    var lstNumbers = new int[count];
    for (var i = 1; i <= count; i++)
    {
        lstNumbers[i-1] = i + 1;
    }
    return lstNumbers;
}
private static int[] GetSomeNumbers_Enumerable_Range()
{
    return  Enumerable.Range(1, count).ToArray();
}

static void performance_100_Million()
{
    var sw = new Stopwatch();

    sw.Start();
    var numbers1 = GetSomeNumbers_List_int();
    sw.Stop();
    //numbers1 = null;
    //GC.Collect();
    Console.WriteLine(String.Format("\"List\" took {0} milliseconds", sw.ElapsedMilliseconds));

    sw.Reset();
    sw.Start();
    var numbers2 = GetSomeNumbers_Array();
    sw.Stop();
    //numbers2 = null;
    //GC.Collect();
    Console.WriteLine(String.Format("\"int[]\" took {0} milliseconds", sw.ElapsedMilliseconds));

    sw.Reset();
    sw.Start();
//getting System.OutOfMemoryException in GetSomeNumbers_Enumerable_Range method
    var numbers3 = GetSomeNumbers_Enumerable_Range();
    sw.Stop();
    //numbers3 = null;
    //GC.Collect();

    Console.WriteLine(String.Format("\"int[]\" Enumerable.Range took {0} milliseconds", sw.ElapsedMilliseconds));
}

and I got OutOfMemoryException in GetSomeNumbers_Enumerable_Range method the only workaround is to deallocate the memory by:

numbers = null;
GC.Collect();