A New GC Blog

Hi!  My name is Chris Lyon, and I'm a tester for the .NET Garbage Collector.  The GC is one of the least-understood components of the CLR, and I hope to try to help our customers better understand it.

Topics I hope to cover:

• General overview of how the GC works
• Finalization
• GC-related APIs (System.GC, System.Weakreference, GCHandle, etc)
• Common GC misconceptions
• GC-related guidelines

Any topic suggestions are welcome, so feel free to leave them in the comments.

About me:

I grew up in Caledon, Ontario, Canada (a suburb of a suburb of Toronto).  I graduated from the University of Waterloo, Canada in December 2002 and have been working at Microsoft since April 2003.

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 02, 2004
  Thanks Ken, it's good to be here!
  
  John, good call. The LOH is another source of confusion. I'll add it to my list.
• Anonymous
  September 02, 2004
  Would you mind covering the large object heap (gmheap)? TIA!
• Anonymous
  September 02, 2004
  Hey Chris!
  
  Good to see another Canadian making U.S. money to send home! <grin>
  
  Ken
  MVP [ASP.NET]
  Toronto (Leaside)
  
• Anonymous
  September 02, 2004
  Hi Chris,
  
  what would you suggest to implement something like the ReferenceQueue in Java?
  
  WeakReferences can be registered with a ReferenceQueue when they are created. The GC adds a weak reference to its associated ReferenceQueue when its target is collected. The queue can then be polled to perform any further clean up. As far as I know there is no similar concept in .NET, right? I have to remember all WeakReferences I ever created and check them regularly, if additional clean up is necessary.
  
  Thanks for any hints.
• Anonymous
  September 07, 2004
  Hi Dennis
  
  Thanks for the suggestion.
  
  I'm not too familiar with ReferenceQueue, but I'll certainly look into it and get back to you.
• Anonymous
  May 28, 2009
  PingBack from http://paidsurveyshub.info/story.php?title=chris-lyon-s-weblog-a-new-gc-blog