Memory is complicated

[giscus[bot]]

Memory is complicated

This is a small story about how memory operates in your .NET application. Well not only .NET but how memory does or does not get allocated.
We will see how a 1 Gigabyte big array is only a few megabytes big to some extend. Furthermore I will discuss working set and committed memory.

https://steven-giesel.com/blogPost/fee60a27-b1c4-491d-a2f1-3371db73ffac

[bpkinez]

Very interesting article!

Thanks

[AloisKraus]

It is even more complicated. See https://aloiskraus.wordpress.com/2016/10/03/windows-10-memory-compression-and-more what else is making Task Manager unreliable if you are searching for memory leaks.

[linkdotnet]

Thanks for the link! Super informativ

[Patrick-3000]

Hello! You are talking about the fact, that reading from memory allocates physical memory. In your example, you are actually writing to memory. Does reading only (without writing) also allocate physical memory?

[linkdotnet]

Good point - reading means touching here. So in order to write to a certain location we have to read the address where we want to right.
I'll use better words! Thanks!

[zen010101]

Here is a PowerShell script:

Get-Process -Name notepad |
Select-Object -Property ID,
@{Name = "WorkingSet(KB)"; Expression = {[math]::Round($.WorkingSet64 / 1024, 2).ToString("#,##0")}},
@{Name = "PrivateWS(KB)"; Expression = {[math]::Round($.PrivateMemorySize64 / 1024, 2).ToString("#,##0")}},
@{Name = "Commit(KB)"; Expression = {[math]::Round($_.PagedMemorySize64 / 1024, 2).ToString("#,##0")}} |
Format-Table -AutoSize