These pages contain guidelines and recommendations for common memory problems, including heuristics about memory usage patterns that might indicate a problem. Every application is different, so these guidelines only outline strategies for memory profiling. To apply these strategies you will need a good understanding of your application.

To get the most useful results, you will need to take several snapshots at appropriate times. You can either do this manually, while you interact with your application, or you can take snapshots at precisely the right moment by modifying your code.

Identifying types of memory problems

There are many different types of memory issue, so the first step to solving your problem is to work out what type of problem you have.

We recommend the following steps:

1. Check for large object heap fragmentation.
2. Check for a leak in unmanaged memory.
3. Check for a leak in, or excessively high usage of, managed memory.