Memory management

Use SafeHandle when wrapping unmanaged resources

When writing wrappers for unmanaged resources, you should subclass SafeHandle rather than trying to implement IDisposable and a finalizer yourself. Your SafeHandle subclass should be as small and simple as possible to minimize the chance of a handle leak. This likely means that your SafeHandle implementation would an internal implementation detail of a class which wraps it to provide a usable API. This class ensures that, even if a program leaks your SafeHandle instance, your unmanaged handle is released.

using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

class MyHandle : SafeHandle
{
    public override bool IsInvalid => handle == IntPtr.Zero;
    public MyHandle() : base(IntPtr.Zero, true)
    { }

    public MyHandle(int length) : this()
    {
        SetHandle(Marshal.AllocHGlobal(length));
    }

    protected override bool ReleaseHandle()
    {
        Marshal.FreeHGlobal(handle);
        return true;
    }
}

Disclaimer: This example is an attempt to show how to guard a managed resource with SafeHandle which implements IDisposable for you and configures finalizers appropriately. It is very contrived and likely pointless to allocate a chunk of memory in this manner.

Unmanaged Resources

When we talk about the GC and the "heap", we're really talking about what's called the managed heap. Objects on the managed heap can access resources not on the managed heap, for example, when writing to or reading from a file. Unexpected behavior can occur when, a file is opened for reading and then an exception occurs, preventing the file handle from closing as it normally would. For this reason, .NET requires that unmanaged resources implement the IDisposable interface. This interface has a single method called Dispose with no parameters:

public interface IDisposable
{
    Dispose();
} 

When handling unmanaged resources, you should make sure that they are properly disposed. You can do this by explicitly calling Dispose() in a finally block, or with a using statement.

StreamReader sr; 
string textFromFile;
string filename = "SomeFile.txt";
try 
{
    sr = new StreamReader(filename);
    textFromFile = sr.ReadToEnd();
}
finally
{
    if (sr != null) sr.Dispose();
}

or

string textFromFile;
string filename = "SomeFile.txt";

using (StreamReader sr = new Streamreader(filename))
{
    textFromFile = sr.ReadToEnd();
}

The latter is the preferred method, and is automatically expanded to the former during compilation.

Remarks

Performance-critical applications in managed .NET applications can be severely impacted by the GC. When the GC runs, all other threads are suspended until it completes. For this reason, it is recommended to carefully evaluate the GC processes and determine how to minimize when it runs.