Diagnosing memory leaks in .NET apps

In this episode, Software Engineer, Mike Rousos, joins Rich to show can we can use tools like dotnet-dump and Visual Studio to diagnose memory leaks in our .NET applications, even if they're running on a different OS.
[00:55] - What are memory leaks?
[04:45] - Inspecting memory leaks cross platform
[18:30] - Using dotnet-dump
[21:35] - Inspecting dumps in Visual Studio
[27:03] - Inspecting dumps with dotnet-dump
🙋‍♀️🙋‍♂️ Get your questions answered on the Microsoft Q&A for .NET: aka.ms/dotnet-qa
🏫 Learn C#, F#, and .NET with free self-guided learning from Microsoft Learn: aka.ms/learndotnet

[@niezebenmansour3736]

Very helpful ! very happy to see diagnosing memory leaks subject in action into the .NET community

[@AKW91]

The most common managed code memory leaks I had the pleasure to locate were almost always objects which had a method registered to a static event. For some reason a lot of developer think, that these are weakly referenced. By now I know what to search for, but since these are also often some kind of lambda expression, their origin is often very difficult to locate.

[@tokenoftime8599]

Excellent video! Very informative and well presented. We need more showcases of this type of tool.

[@expertreviews1112]

This was such an incredibly informative video.. thanks a LOT

[@rohit16db]

Very good explanation, thank you so much for this. One question, you talked about gcroot command in video position 32.31 but i can't see that commend, can you explain what command you typed to get the location in actual source code?

[@elghali6687]

Very helpful thank you

[@lukejkw]

I've never heard 2 guys so open about when they take a dump

[@judew-devmon]

Very good. Thanks

[@mnbvcggg]

Great video. How can we get a creation stack trace. Which method created the instance. Thanks!

[@GuilhermeCardoso-td8qu]

By any chance you got an update about the OutOfMemoryException not tearing down process?

[@emanuelporemba1640]

Is the GC aware of constructions like object A is holding a ref to object B and B is holding a reference to A, but no one else references A or B. Would it collect those objects at some point or not?

[@taishi-sama-tfc]

Yes, it's one of the tasks of GC to clean up cyclic references. In .NET this done by creating a graph that contains all the objects that are reachable from the roots(static fields, local variables on a thread's stack, CPU registers, GC handles and etc.) and releasing all memory allocated for objects, unreachable from the application's roots.

[@CrivatFlorin]

I have VS 2022 Community and I cannot find Actions > Debug managed memory after I open the dump file. Is it available for my version of VS?

[@vyacheslavmikhailov7974]

Only in Enterprise it seems.

[@eclipsetutorialvideo]

Useless if you don't use the enterprise VS :( we don't have debug managed memory option when we open the dump file

[@NiklasLord]

I noticed that too. You can use dotnet-gcdump instead and open that in VS. Should be the same commands etc just add the gc part.

[@prasannachoudhari8552]

I could help but laugh at 16:31
😂 r/nocontext

[@vincidixit]

😂

[@prasannachoudhari8552]

@@vincidixit 😬

[@user-lt9oy6td9u]

its cool that it works on windows but on my macos i have wierd behavior..
so running clrstack gives something like failed to find runtime module (libcoreclr.dylib). thats on .net 6.0 app build with rider using the arm sdk