Why does struct alignment depend on whether a field type is primitive or user-defined?

Question

In Noda Time v2, we're moving to nanosecond resolution. That means we can no longer use an 8-byte integer to represent the whole range of time we're interested in. That has prompted me to investigate the memory usage of the (many) structs of Noda Time, which has in turn led me to uncover a slight oddity in the CLR's alignment decision.

Firstly, I realize that this is an implementation decision, and that the default behaviour could change at any time. I realize that I can modify it using [StructLayout] and [FieldOffset], but I'd rather come up with a solution which didn't require that if possible.

My core scenario is that I have a struct which contains a reference-type field and two other value-type fields, where those fields are simple wrappers for int. I had hoped that that would be represented as 16 bytes on the 64-bit CLR (8 for the reference and 4 for each of the others), but for some reason it's using 24 bytes. I'm measuring the space using arrays, by the way - I understand that the layout may be different in different situations, but this felt like a reasonable starting point.

Here's a sample program demonstrating the issue:

using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

#pragma warning disable 0169

struct Int32Wrapper
{
    int x;
}

struct TwoInt32s
{
    int x, y;
}

struct TwoInt32Wrappers
{
    Int32Wrapper x, y;
}

struct RefAndTwoInt32s
{
    string text;
    int x, y;
}

struct RefAndTwoInt32Wrappers
{
    string text;
    Int32Wrapper x, y;
}    

class Test
{
    static void Main()
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Environment: CLR {0} on {1} ({2})",
            Environment.Version,
            Environment.OSVersion,
            Environment.Is64BitProcess ? "64 bit" : "32 bit");
        ShowSize<Int32Wrapper>();
        ShowSize<TwoInt32s>();
        ShowSize<TwoInt32Wrappers>();
        ShowSize<RefAndTwoInt32s>();
        ShowSize<RefAndTwoInt32Wrappers>();
    }

    static void ShowSize<T>()
    {
        long before = GC.GetTotalMemory(true);
        T[] array = new T[100000];
        long after  = GC.GetTotalMemory(true);        
        Console.WriteLine("{0}: {1}", typeof(T),
                          (after - before) / array.Length);
    }
}

And the compilation and output on my laptop:

c:\Users\Jon\Test>csc /debug- /o+ ShowMemory.cs
Microsoft (R) Visual C# Compiler version 12.0.30501.0
for C# 5
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.


c:\Users\Jon\Test>ShowMemory.exe
Environment: CLR 4.0.30319.34014 on Microsoft Windows NT 6.2.9200.0 (64 bit)
Int32Wrapper: 4
TwoInt32s: 8
TwoInt32Wrappers: 8
RefAndTwoInt32s: 16
RefAndTwoInt32Wrappers: 24

So:

• If you don't have a reference type field, the CLR is happy to pack Int32Wrapper fields together (TwoInt32Wrappers has a size of 8)
• Even with a reference type field, the CLR is still happy to pack int fields together (RefAndTwoInt32s has a size of 16)
• Combining the two, each Int32Wrapper field appears to be padded/aligned to 8 bytes. (RefAndTwoInt32Wrappers has a size of 24.)
• Running the same code in the debugger (but still a release build) shows a size of 12.

A few other experiments have yielded similar results:

• Putting the reference type field after the value type fields doesn't help
• Using object instead of string doesn't help (I expect it's "any reference type")
• Using another struct as a "wrapper" around the reference doesn't help
• Using a generic struct as a wrapper around the reference doesn't help
• If I keep adding fields (in pairs for simplicity), int fields still count for 4 bytes, and Int32Wrapper fields count for 8 bytes
• Adding [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential, Pack = 4)] to every struct in sight doesn't change the results

Does anyone have any explanation for this (ideally with reference documentation) or a suggestion of how I can get hint to the CLR that I'd like the fields to be packed without specifying a constant field offset?

Answer 1

I think this is a bug. You are seeing the side-effect of automatic layout, it likes to align non-trivial fields to an address that's a multiple of 8 bytes in 64-bit mode. It occurs even when you explicitly apply the [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)] attribute. That is not supposed to happen.

You can see it by making the struct members public and appending test code like this:

    var test = new RefAndTwoInt32Wrappers();
    test.text = "adsf";
    test.x.x = 0x11111111;
    test.y.x = 0x22222222;
    Console.ReadLine();      // <=== Breakpoint here

When the breakpoint hits, use Debug + Windows + Memory + Memory 1. Switch to 4-byte integers and put &test in the Address field:

 0x000000E928B5DE98  0ed750e0 000000e9 11111111 00000000 22222222 00000000 

0xe90ed750e0 is the string pointer on my machine (not yours). You can easily see the Int32Wrappers, with the extra 4 bytes of padding that turned the size into 24 bytes. Go back to the struct and put the string last. Repeat and you'll see the string pointer is still first. Violating LayoutKind.Sequential, you got LayoutKind.Auto.

It is going to be difficult to convince Microsoft to fix this, it has worked this way for too long so any change is going to be breaking something. The CLR only makes an attempt to honor [StructLayout] for the managed version of a struct and make it blittable, it in general quickly gives up. Notoriously for any struct that contains a DateTime. You only get the true LayoutKind guarantee when marshaling a struct. The marshaled version certainly is 16 bytes, as Marshal.SizeOf() will tell you.

Using LayoutKind.Explicit fixes it, not what you wanted to hear.