Modelon Solutions

I know I know, how can i have memory leaks, you’ve got a garbage collector in that fancy .net don’t you ?

So this is the second project i work on where we find memory leaks in production. The first one was a third party library that didn’t release a bitmap when it generated reports using it, the second one wants to hold on to Entity Framework contexts after they’ve been used.

Not much i can do about the first case cause i don’t have access to the objects and can release them, but the second one is directly in our code.

The thing is, as soon as Entity Framework context goes out of scope, it should release it’s memory -it’s all managed, and IDispose juste releases the memory deterministically.

Now the fun part, with IOC and DI containers, we tend to receive our references and the container itself manages the lifetime. So if our container is badly configured, we depend on the container to release objects (so they can garbage collected) and just lost the ability to get garbage collection based on out of scope…

DI containers are fun and fancy, and a real plus when you are testing, but PLEASE ensure they are configured correctly !

The first memory leak was hosted on premise with IT people who had no idea how to take a memory snapshot, that was hard.

Azure on the other hand, has all of this stuff built-in, i was completely blown away at how much diagnostic tools were build into the plateform. It’s called “Diagnostics as a Service”. Go discover it !