COM & .NET Component Services

COM+ Instance Management Pitfalls

COM+ instance management and object activation have a few minor pitfalls and limitations you should be aware of to make the best use of what COM+ has to offer. This section also discusses a feature of the Component Services Explorer that will help you profile your application and keep track of your object instances.

Idle Time Management

Under classic COM, a process hosting COM objects would be left running as long as clients with active references to objects are in that process. Once the last client releases its reference on the last object in that process, COM would shut down the hosting process. This policy clearly conflicts with COM+ object pooling—the idea is to keep objects alive, even if they do not serve any clients. COM+ allows you to configure your server application’s idle time management on the Advanced tab of the application’s properties page (see Figure 3-10). The Advanced tab has a properties group called Server Process Shutdown. If your application contains pools of objects, you can leave the hosting process running when the application is idle—that is, when the application is not servicing clients and all objects are in the pool. However, your objects continue to occupy resources as long as the process is running, and if the client activation requests are few and far between, this may not be a good tradeoff.

Alternatively, you can specify how long you want to keep the application idle by providing any number between 0 and 999 minutes. ...