CLR via C#, Fourth Edition

Chapter 21. The Managed Heap and Garbage Collection

In this chapter:

Managed Heap Basics

Generations: Improving Performance

Working with Types Requiring Special Cleanup

Monitoring and Controlling the Lifetime of Objects Manually

In this chapter, I’ll discuss how managed applications construct new objects, how the managed heap controls the lifetime of these objects, and how the memory for these objects gets reclaimed. In short, I’ll explain how the garbage collector in the common language runtime (CLR) works, and I’ll explain various performance issues related to it. I’ll also discuss how to design applications so that they use memory most efficiently.

Managed Heap Basics

Every program uses resources of one sort or another, be they files, memory buffers, ...