Hot Tips for Increasing Garbage Collection Performance

Curator's Note: The following is a follow-up to this MVB's recent presentation on garbage collection performance tips.

Thanks for attending my DevReach session on garbage collection performance tips! This is one of my favorite subjects, and I found it very hard to cover it well in just under one hour. Still, we discussed the general inner workings of the garbage collector and highlighted several best practices for improving your application performance.

Among the topics we covered:

• Switching GC flavors and understanding server, concurrent, and background GC
• Finding long-lived objects and allocation sources with CLR Profiler
• Detecting virtual address space fragmentation with VMMap
• Understanding some finalization pitfalls, including memory leaks

You can find the slides and demos for this session here. Looking forward to seeing you at next year’s DevReach!

Of course, I can’t conclude this without a book plug: Pro .NET Performance contains a 60-page chapter on GC internals and performance characteristics. I think you should definitely read it if you care about your managed applications’ performance.