Im a complete novice to the "best practices" etc of writing in any code. I tend to just write it an if it works, why fix it.
Well, this way of working is landing me in some hot water. I am writing a simple windows service to server a single webpage. (This service will be incorperated in to another project which monitors the services and some folders on a group of servers.)
My problem is that whenever a request is recieved, the memory usage jumps up by a few K per request and keeps qoing up on every request.
Now ive found that by putting GC.Collect in the mix it stops at a certain number but im sure its not meant to be used this way. I was wondering if i am missing something or not doing something i should to free up memory.
Here is the code:
Public Class SimpleWebService : Inherits ServiceBase
'Set the values for the different event log types.
Public Const EVENT_ERROR As Integer = 1
Public Const EVENT_WARNING As Integer = 2
Public Const EVENT_INFORMATION As Integer = 4
Public listenerThread As Thread
Dim HTTPListner As HttpListener
Dim blnKeepAlive As Boolean = True
Shared Sub Main()
Dim ServicesToRun As ServiceBase()
ServicesToRun = New ServiceBase() {New SimpleWebService()}
ServiceBase.Run(ServicesToRun)
End Sub
Protected Overrides Sub OnStart(ByVal args As String())
If Not HttpListener.IsSupported Then
CreateEventLogEntry("Windows XP SP2, Server 2003, or higher is required to " & "use the HttpListener class.")
Me.Stop()
End If
Try
listenerThread = New Thread(AddressOf ListenForConnections)
listenerThread.Start()
Catch ex As Exception
CreateEventLogEntry(ex.Message)
End Try
End Sub
Protected Overrides Sub OnStop()
blnKeepAlive = False
End Sub
Private Sub CreateEventLogEntry(ByRef strEventContent As String)
Dim sSource As String
Dim sLog As String
sSource = "Service1"
sLog = "Application"
If Not EventLog.SourceExists(sSource) Then
EventLog.CreateEventSource(sSource, sLog)
End If
Dim ELog As New EventLog(sLog, ".", sSource)
ELog.WriteEntry(strEventContent)
End Sub
Public Sub ListenForConnections()
HTTPListner = New HttpListener
HTTPListner.Prefixes.Add("http://*:1986/")
HTTPListner.Start()
Do While blnKeepAlive
Dim ctx As HttpListenerContext = HTTPListner.GetContext()
Dim HandlerThread As Thread = New Thread(AddressOf ProcessRequest)
HandlerThread.Start(ctx)
HandlerThread = Nothing
Loop
HTTPListner.Stop()
End Sub
Private Sub ProcessRequest(ByVal ctx As HttpListenerContext)
Dim sb As StringBuilder = New StringBuilder
sb.Append("<html><body><h1>Test My Service</h1>")
sb.Append("</body></html>")
Dim buffer() As Byte = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(sb.ToString)
ctx.Response.ContentLength64 = buffer.Length
ctx.Response.OutputStream.Write(buffer, 0, buffer.Length)
ctx.Response.OutputStream.Close()
ctx.Response.Close()
sb = Nothing
buffer = Nothing
ctx = Nothing
'This line seems to keep the mem leak down
'System.GC.Collect()
End Sub
End Class
Please feel free to critisise and tear the code apart but please BE KIND. I have admitted I dont tend to follow the best practice when it comes to coding.
You are right, you should not be doing this. Remove the Collect() call and let it run for a week. Any decent .NET book will talk about how the garbage collector works and how it does not immediately release memory when you set an object to Nothing. It doesn't kick in until you've consumed somewhere between 2 and 8 megabytes. This is not a leak, merely effective use of a plentiful resource.
You use a new thread for each individual connection, that's pretty expensive and scales very poorly when you get a lot of connections. Consider using ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem instead. Threadpool threads are very cheap and their allocation and execution is well controlled by the threadpool manager.