Why does Castle Windsor hold onto transient objects?

Question

Recently I noticed my application appears to be eating memory that never gets released. After profiling with CLRProfiler I\'ve found that the Castle Windsor container I\'m u

Answer 1

I think the answers here are missing a vital point - that this behavior is configurable out of the box via release policies - check out the documentation on the castle project site here.

In many scenarios especially where your container exists for the lifetime of the hosting application, and where transient components really don't need to be tracked (because you're handling disposal in your calling code or component that's been injected with the service) then you can just set the release policy to the NoTrackingReleasePolicy implementation and be done with it.

Prior to Castle v 1.0 I believe Component Burden will be implemented/introduced - which will help alleviate some of these issues as well around disposal of injected dependencies etc.

Edit:

Check out the following posts for more discussion of component burden.

The Component Burden - Davy Brions

Also component burden is implemented in the official 2.0 release of the Windsor Container.

Answer 2

You can set a lifestyle of singleton or transient though on objects in the container. Singleton objects I understand should last the life of the application, but I don't understand the usefulness of this behvaviour being the same for transient ones!

Custom lifestyles can be created by implementing ILifestyleManager. Maybe it's possible to implement this suitably to create a ReallyTransient lifestyle type!

Answer 3

One thing to note is that this seems to have been fixed in the Castle Trunk. In r5475, Hammett changed the default release policy in MicroKernel to LifecycledComponentsReleasePolicy.