Many of the past posts regarding the task manager can
be misleading. People could get the false impression
that task manager is "defective" or that the numbers it
shows are "meaningless".
It seems to me that things in the group have degraded to:
1. Person asks question regarding leak or possible
high memory use/performance problem
2. Knee-jerk response of "Are you looking at Task
Manager--forget that, it is wrong anyway. Besides,
today's machines have tons of RAM, who cares?"
This is not a good approach, because high memory
use and/or leaks can cause performance problems and
errors, even on machines with relatively large amounts
of RAM. It is important to remember that an app
may be used under terminal services, in which case
sloppy memory/resource use issues are multiplied.
Task manager displays a number of performance
counters in an easy to use format. It displays the correct
values of these performance counters, just as it did *long*
before the first .NET application existed.
What it doesn't show, and never has shown, is the amount
of memory sharing that is occuring, how much of allocated
memory has recently been touched by the process, the
minimum working set that each process requires to perform
well, how much of allocated memory is resident, etc.
Task manager can be very helpful in detecting substantial
memory leaks in .NET apps. For example, it is easy to
create a winforms app with a leak and then use taskman to
view an ever-increasing amount of private bytes (VM Size)
allocated. It is not helpful for very small leaks, for example,
4 bytes every once in a while.
I would strongly recommend that you and anyone else who
would like to understand memory management under windows
read chapter 7 of Windows Internals, by Mark Russinovich &
David Solomon:
http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Wind...dp/0735619174/
-TP
Cor Ligthert [MVP] wrote:
A pity Jeff, that it is a very known issue.
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/...rch+this+group
Cor