Pro .NET Memory Management, Second Edition

For Better Code, Performance, and Scalability

Understand .NET memory management internal workings, pitfalls, and techniques in order to effectively avoid a wide range of performance and scalability problems in your software. Despite automatic memory management in .NET, there are many advantages to be found in understanding how .NET memory works and how you can best write software that interacts with it efficiently and effectively. This book is your comprehensive guide to writing better software by understanding and working with memory management in .NET, from Framework up to .NET 8.

Thoroughly vetted by the .NET Team at Microsoft, this book contains valuable troubleshooting scenarios designed to help diagnose challenging memory problems. You will also benefit from a multitude of .NET memory management “rules” to live by that introduce methods for writing memory-aware code and the means for avoiding common, destructive pitfalls.

I wanted to write this book in a manner pleasant for every .NET developer. No matter how experienced you are, you should find something interesting here. While we start from the basics, junior programmers quickly will have an opportunity to get deeper into .NET internals. More advanced programmers will find many implementation details more interesting. And above all, regardless of experience, everyone should be able to benefit from the presented practical examples of code and problem diagnoses.

Thus, knowledge from this book should help you to write better code – more performance and memory aware, utilizing related features without fear but with full understanding. This also leads to better performance and scalability of your applications – the more memory oriented your code is, the less exposed it is for resource bottlenecks and utilization of them not optimally. I hope you will find the “For Better Code, Performance, and Scalability” subtitle justified after reading this book.

What you'll learn:

- Understand the theoretical underpinnings of automatic memory management;
- Take a deep dive into every aspect of .NET memory management, including detailed coverage of garbage collection (GC) implementation, that would otherwise take years of experience to acquire;
- Get practical advice on how this knowledge can be applied in real-world software development;
- Use practical knowledge of tools related to .NET memory management to diagnose various memory-related issues;
- Explore various aspects of advanced memory management, including use of Span and Memory types.