Prevent .NET Garbage collection for short period of time

c# performance garbage-collection
drobertson picture drobertson · May 15, 2011 · Viewed 35.6k times · Source

I have a high performance application that is handling a very large amount of data. It is receiving, analysing and discarding enormous amounts of information over very short periods of time. This causes a fair amount of object churn that I am currently trying to optimize, but it also causes a secondary problem. When Garbage Collection kicks in it can cause some long delays as it cleans things up (by long I mean 10s to 100s of milliseconds). 99% of the time this is acceptable, but for brief windows of time about 1-2 minutes long I need to be absolutely sure that Garbage Collection does not cause a delay. I know when these periods of time will occur beforehand and I just need a way to make sure that Garbage collection doesn't happen during this period. The application is written in C# using .NET 4.0 Framework and uses both managed and unmanaged code if that matters.

My questions are;

  1. Is it possible to briefly pause Garbage Collection for the entire program?
  2. Is it possible to use System.GC.Collect() to force garbage collection before the window I need free of Garbage Collection and if I do how long will I be Garbage Collection free?
  3. What advice do people have on minimizing the need for Garbage Collection overall?

Note - this system is fairly complex with lots of different components. I am hoping to avoid going to a approach where I have to implement a custom IDisposable interface on every class of the program.

Answer

xanatos picture xanatos · Aug 14, 2015

.NET 4.6 added two new methods: GC.TryStartNoGCRegion and GC.EndNoGCRegion just for this.

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