How to free up memory in C# applications?

[Noemi Katinka]

Hi everybody, I work with big XML files and i want to free up the memory after a have finished working with one file. If i set the reference of the XmlDocument to null the memory will be free from the GC. But how can i free the memory immediately when i don't need any more the reference? Thanks.

[Gareth H]

Noemi Katinka, Call "thing.Dispose()" Regards, Gareth.

[Christian Graus]

how big are these files ? You'd have to force GC, which is usually a bad idea, and can mess up memory management in general in your app. XML files are just text, there's nothing to Dispose.

Christian Graus Please read this if you don't understand the answer I've given you "also I don't think "TranslateOneToTwoBillion OneHundredAndFortySevenMillion FourHundredAndEightyThreeThousand SixHundredAndFortySeven()" is a very good choice for a function name" - SpacixOne ( offering help to someone who really needed it ) ( spaces added for the benefit of people running at < 1280x1024 )

[tgrt]

Don't mess with it. Let the garbage collector do its job when the memory is needed. You can cause more problems running a garbage collection manually by ending up promoting other objects to higher generations.

[stano]

You could use an XmlReader to parse through the document without having to load the entire document in memory. I've found this useful when loading records from very large XML files (i.e. 100Mb and above).