Memory leak, Dispose() and Using statement (1)

The project I worked on has a huge memory leak in production environment. It was reported recently by onsite engineer. I believe this problem exists for a long time. It hid very well previously.

Memory leak is always not easy to fix. First step you have to find out which place has memory leak. It is painful to go through this process. Next step you have to release the memory properly. It sounds simple, but not because CLR is supposed to take care of the memory stuff. It works as a memory manager for .Net application, right? Something must be wrong if CLR can not do its job well which means somewhere in your code breaks the default garbage collection rules. Of course third step you have to run pair testing for over 12 hours to see the results. It is not compulsory to be 12 hours. 2 hours even 1 hour is still good for the middle test. It has to be long enough to make you confident that your modification works or it does not work. But the final test has to be more than 12 hours because this time you want to show your managers and team members that your modification works. Generally you will see some nice results after several times tests. Another annoy thing about memory leak problem is that memory leak usually does not happen at only one place. You have to find them piece by piece and fix them piece by piece. The test result will be a bit nicer, a bit nicer, a bit more nicer... Usually not big change at one time. It also means memory leak problem is time consuming.

So to fix memory leak problem, probably you will go through hopeless, depressed, disappointed, and annoyed. And most of the important hopefully you will feel happiness in the end . I reach the last one every time luckily.

Many thanks to my lovely and funny colleagues, Colin, Takashi, and Thura. They make my job more interesting.