[vtkusers] ActiviZ | Strange Error | DavidCole

[David Cole]

One of the pain-in-the-butt things about a system that controls the 
memory management for you is that you don't have much control over when 
the memory *actually* gets released back to the system. It may occur 
much later than your variables going out of scope.

When garbage collection kicks in is unpredictable at best. You can 
force calls to the .NET garbage collection, but if you're going to do 
that, then you have to decide *when* to do it. You don't want to do it 
all the time because it will slow your application down, mostly 
unnecessarily. But you definitely want it to happen after you've 
released some big chunks of memory, and before you need new chunks for 
further operations. "If and when to force garbage collection" is a 
difficult decision...

Switching to 64-bit, and having sufficient RAM for what you're actually 
doing in your app is probably the best approach. Punt if it's 4th down.


Good luck,
David C.