Visual Studio diagnostic tools not displaying process memory - c#

I have a VB.NET app (with C# libraries) which is consuming large amounts of memory over time. Ultimately the application runs out of memory. I am cautious about using the term leaking because the GC shouldn't allow a memory leak, but perhaps there is a large .NET object somewhere. If so I need to identify it.
However I do have a reference to a 3rd party ActiveX control library (.ocx) of which I use some controls and make numerous calls retrieving laser beam profile data. Memory usage increases only when I run a loop retrieving the laser beam profile data from the ocx. I suspect the ocx but need to know for sure before contacting the vendor.
I debugged my application in Visual Studio 2017, Diagnostic Tools with Memory Tools enabled, and option Memory Enable native heap profiling with snapshots enabled.
My issue is I don't see the massive amount of memory in the graph at all in the Memory Usage tab of diagnostic tools. After 30 minutes my application is at around 2GB and being an x86 application, this is a problem - regardless of cpu architecture really. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong thing.
So what am I doing wrong to find the memory issue? How can I find the offending objects?
Update 1
I ran the Performance Profiler and did not see any increase in memory as seen with diagnostic tools. Task manager also confirms that no memory leak is present when running with Performance Profiling. Running without profiling afterwards shows a memory leak again.

Related

c# (.NET): Large Generation 2 Heap with 93% free space and 100% fragmentation

the current program I wrote have a very high memory usage like a memory leak. This is observable with help of Nagios. If the memory is very high and the program run very slow I get a memory dump via Windows task manager and analyse it with help of JetBrains dotMemory (External size is ca. 1 GB). Here I see a real usage of ca. 73 MB and a memory usage of generation 2 Heap of 660MB (!), 616 MB are marked as free and 42 MB are in use. The fragmentation is 100%.
I know I cannot influence managed memory and the GC should be cleanup the memory automatically. There are any things to consider to solve this problem?
The program is a C# .NET standalone application, build with Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6 in mode "Any CPU". I belive that the .NET framework on the target machine is an other version but how can I get the current installed and used version of .NET runtime?
If you need any other information please ask me for :)
UPDATE
The program is a machine control system that communicate with a SPS via OPC, contains a database access to an Orcale database and a lot of web services for communication with other bordered systems.
UPDATE
Here is the image of memory usage from dotMemory:
I see a lot of pinned objects (red regions). They are preventing to defragment heaps where they located. Run dotMemory with /internal command line key, there will appear "Pinned objects" link on Heap Fragmentation control, there you can see what objects are pinned.

C# application using too much ram

stackoverflow. I've written a application in C# (a raytracer). Problem is not with raytracer but with ray usage. Application keep consuming more ram over time.
Ram usage while not raytracing : start with 10mb goes up and up
Ram usege while raytracing : start 80mb then 120mb and up, if resolution is big
this number is up to 500mb.
I looked to VS Diagnostics tool and see application garbage collection is like 10 gc in 1 minute. This number is even bigger while application is raytracing. Raytracer returns a gigantic pixel array. I set pixel array to null after raytracing but application ram stucks in a range of 500-600 mb ram.
Are there any options to collect more garbage or free ram?
EDIT
This is a WinForms application, not WPF or something.
I cant be sure since there is no code, but it sounds like a memory leak. Verify that there are no static object referencing the problematic object. To verify, run GC.Collect() after you set the object to null since if its in generation 2 for example it might take a while for the garbage collector to check it and reclaim it's memory. if after GC.Collect you see that the memory is not reclaimed, you most likely have a memory leak somewhere. If you cant find the location of the rouge reference, you can use tools like this https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudioalm/2015/04/29/diagnosing-event-handler-leaks-with-the-memory-usage-tool-in-visual-studio-2015/
Good luck
Can i recommend you attempt to identify if any memory leaks are contributing to the progressive increase of memory usage of your application. There are plenty of free and paid tools that are available to achieve this task, along with endless advice on how to go about using them. The vs diagnostics tool has the ability to snapshot the memory usage of your application identifying where it is in use and what class types are present. Further information and example of use for the VS diagnostics tools can be found here : https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Visual-Studio-Toolbox/Visual-Studio-2015-Diagnostic-Tools
Further Help : What strategies and tools are useful for finding memory leaks in .NET?
Similar searches for ".net identify memory leaks" on here and other platforms will also help.
Commonly memory leaks are caused by the incorrect disposal and the retention of circular references, so identify any locations across your code where circular references are present.

How to solve Private bytes (Native memory) leak?

I'm developing a C# application which seems to have a leak.
I've used memory profiler and found that my
private bytes keep increasing but Bytes in all Heaps do not, which means that probably it's a native memory leak
Now I'm stuck, how do I find memory leaks in native code ?
First, if you have a dump of the leaking process, you can open it in WinDbg and issue the command :
!address -summary
if RegionUsageHeap is large, then it should be a native memory leak
if RegionUsageIsVAD, then it should be a .NET memory leak.
If this is a native leak, then you have 2 options :
Use DebugDiag : when prompt, choose 'Native Memory leak and Handle leak', choose the process you want to diagnose, and start working with the application until you experiment the memory leak. When complete, generate a full dump of the application (right click on the leak rule and select Full user dump). You can then analyze the generated dump (you'll need to have the symbols properly configured for this to work efficiently) : on 'advanced analysis' tab, select 'Memory pressure analyzers', open the dump file and press 'Start analysis'. This produces and html report you can analyze. You can refer to this page for a detailed walkthrough.
Use Application Verifier / WinDbg. In application verifier, select your application (.exe). In tests page, be sure Basics/Heaps is selected. In the lower pane, be sure 'Traces' is set to true. Once the configuration saved, re-run the application and generate a full dump when the leak occurs. Don't forget to clean application flags after the dump is generated. Then you can open the dump from within WinDbg, and investigate the leak with the help of '!heap' command. In particular, '!heap -l' will give you a list of leaked blocks, '!heap -p -a ' will show the details of a block, including the call stack of allocation.
If this is a .NET leak, there are third party tools to troubleshoot it. Starting from version 1.2, DebugDiag is also enable to perform .NET memory leak analysis (never tried this however).
Diagnosing native memory leaks in a managed application is (at least initially) very similar to diagnosing memory leaks in any other native application.
The way I normally approach these problems is to get the process to leak a large amount of memory, take a full process dump and then examine the dump to see what is using the most memory. For example if your process has a normal / initial private bytes of ~20MB but you can get your process to leak memory until it has ~200MB of private bytes, then there is a good chance that ~180MB of that memory is leaked - generally speaking whatever has the most memory allocated is where you should start looking.
Microsoft have a very useful tool called DebugDiag - initially developed for use in diagnosing memory leaks in IIS it is a very vesatile tool and very handy when dealing with memory issues. If you give it a crash dump it will perform some analysis and should (at the very least) tell you what module has allocated all of that memory, you can then start looking more specifically at how that module is used.
It's hard to give you a solid response without more information, but it sounds like the lib you are trying to use has a memory leak. You'll need to the lib with the appropriate tools, depending on the language it was written in. If you don't have the lib's source, contact the developers and have them fix the leak.
If you can post the name of the library and some of your source code (as well as the native method signatures), we might be able to give you some more specific advice.
private bytes in heaps managed by .net framework, you need use professional tool to analysis your source. such like use red gate memory profiler, find object created but not being disposed.
Usually I had the best results when hunting memory leaks using the ANTS Memory Profiler.
(Or other tools, personally I had best experiences with ANTS)

How to identify memory leaks in c#? [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Closed 12 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
Anatomy of a “Memory Leak”
Hi All
what are the best practices for identifying memory leak in c#?
How about
ANTS Memory Profiler™: Profile the memory usage of your .NET application
ANTS Performance Profiler for optimizing your .NET code
Memory Leak Detection in .NET
First, install the latest version of the Microsoft Debugging Tools. Its a prerequisite.
To analyze memory consumption, I recommend you to download & use .Net Memory Profiler. It really simplifies all the process.
MemProfiler allows to analyze managed memory utilization from managed applications, windows services, asp.net apps and from memory dumps.
To find a leak on a process on a DEV machine, run MemProfiler and simply attach to the desired process. Once you are profiling, take a snapshots and MemProfiler will tell you which and how many instances are loaded, so you could know what is allocating your memory. Take at least 2 memory snapshots on different moments and compare them to see the “delta instances”. ( If delta is >0 then N new instances were created. Otherwise, delta<0, they were destroyed)
When to collect the memory dumps?
You may take the first one after all the “required stuff” has been loaded, in example, after your app has responded successfully to a few requests.
You probably will make a load test to the app before taking the second snapshot, because if the app has leakead A LOT, then its easier to find out where.
You can also continue to load test the app and take a 3rd, 4th snapshots, just in case.
To collect a memory dump on web application on a production environment:
You are not required to install the Debugging tools on the server. You can install it on a developer pc and then copy the folder to the production environment. E.g c:\Program Files (x86)\Debugging Tools for Windows (x86)
To identify the Asp.Net w3wp use this command (works with W7 and Server 2008, didnt tried with 2003) : %windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd list wp
To generate the dump, execute: AdPlus -hang -p <process id> -o <outputDir>
Other Tips:
Generally your app will appear to leak strings, and in all the cases that I analyzed that was false. In my case, I used Asp.NET+WCF+IdentityModel, and they used a LOT of strings.
If you are interested, do the “.NET Memory Profiler Tutorials” at http://memprofiler.com/tutorials/ and follow Tess Ferrandez blog http://blogs.msdn.com/tess/
If you think that probably there is a memory leak somewhere, but you have no idea where could it be, start by watching memory usage per process with Task Manager or Process Explorer, looking for a process that eats always more and more RAM:
Use AdPlus to generate the dump, avoid Task Manager, because Task Manager is a 32 bit process probably dumping a 64 bit one. MemProfiler gets confused in that case.
When analyzing the objects in the memory, you will see an ExecutionEngineException, StackOverflowException and OutOfMemoryException on the heap. Don’t Panic. They doesn't mean that your application are raising that exceptions, they are always pre-allocated just in case:
Use a memory profiler - attach it to the suspected process and run the suspected actions.
You can find some recommended profilers in the answers to this question.
Visual Studio Profiling/Performance Tools allow you to track Object Allocation and Lifetime.
Unfortunately, that's only available in the more costly editions of the VS hierarchy.

CLR out of memory exceptions

We are getting a lot of out of memory exceptions and we can't seem to diagnose what is happening. It seems to be an issue that happens that will spike memory usage from 300 MB to over 1 GB in a matter of a few minutes. Now this is an IIS application and has three application domains running in separate thread pools.
We want to record when the memory exceptions are about to happen. So we can attempt to find a pattern. What is the best way to do this?
Is there a way to query the memory usage once a minute to see how high it is and send an alert email. Or maybe write an application that will monitor the CLR's memory usage? An ideas or a direction are more than welcome.
I am using Performance Monitor, but unless I am watching the process it is not that useful. I can only see what is was and when. I have also used the Red Gate Memory Profile tool, which is awesome by the way - only I cannot seem to hit upon the page or process that is causing the exception.
Install ADPlus on your server (it's part of the Windows Debugging Tools). When you start observing unusually high memory usage capture a memory dump using:
adplus -hang -p <PID> -quiet -o <dump file folder path>
<PID> is the process ID of the worker process which you can get from tasklist.exe.
If you're not always around when this issue occurs then you could automate capturing a memory dump using DebugDiag:
Use DebugDiag in leak tracking mode to trigger a process dump when either your Private or Virtual memory use reaches a certain threshold. That said, I've not always found this reliable.
Use DebugDiag in Crash Mode to capture a dump whenever CLR exceptions are thrown. You can used the Advanced Settings to configure DebugDiag to produce a full memory dump upon encountering a CLR exception of type System.OutOfMemoryException. This is more reliable and will definitely trigger. Only use Advanced Settings -> Exceptions, don't touch the Unconfigured First Chance Exceptions, leave this setting at None.
Once you have your memory dump, fire up WinDBG then load the dump file and load up SOS and start poking about.
Tess Ferrandez's blog is a great .NET debugging resource and she has plenty of articles and labs about how to track down memory leaks (these are archive.org links due to broken links):
If it is broken, fix it you should - memory issue articles
.NET Debugging Demos Lab 6:_Memory Leak
.NET Debugging Demos Lab 6:_Memory Leak - Review
.NET Debugging Demos Lab 7: Memory Leak
.NET Debugging Demos Lab 7: Memory Leak - Review
PerfMon counters are useful and can be used to confirm that you have a memory leak, but they don't tell the whole story. WinDBG and SOS are the tools you need to use to find out where your memory is being used.
Performance Monitor, aka Perfmon, is your friend - it is free and not intrusive and lightweight and can be safely run on production servers if you use less frequent sampling (every few seconds). The minimum it can do is to sample memory and CPU usage for your processes (w3wp.exe) and store them on a file.
Since you have not shared what you are doing in the application I can't suggest performance counters to store, but there are plenty in the ASP.NET and .NET and CLR.
Since you are getting a CLR out of memory exception, my hunch is GC is not working due to a pinned object or something. I doubt it is an unmanaged resource, such as bitmap, not being released although it could be.
Here are a list of counters I suggest:
.NET CLR Memory
GC Handles
Pinned Objects
Process for the w3wp.exe running your application
A couple, but mostly Working Set
ASP.NET
Managed Memory used
Try RedGate Memory Profiler. I suppose it works with ASP.NET sites (their performance profiler definitely does).
Use a memory profiler. There are a couple of good ones out there, e.g. JetBrains dotTrace or ANTS Memory Profiler from Red Gate. There were a couple of discussions here at Stack Overflow with lots of other tips and recommendations.
If you cannot afford a good profiler, you should use what Microsoft recommends in Production Debugging for .NET Framework Applications.
I would use ADPlus in "crash" mode to capture a memory dump when the exception occurs, and then WinDbg and SOS to figure out what's taking up all of the memory.
Use dotTrace or YourToolkit .NET where you can attach the profiler to the ASP process.
They have a trial version, so you don't need to spend money right away. Using these profilers you can select the timeline where memory starts increasing (you can see the memory usage visually in a graph), so it should be quite easy to select the range and understand what is causing the memory usage to shoot up so high.

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