Reading pictures from DB using memorystreams and images often crashes with Out of Memory

Question

I'm trying to figure out if there is something seriously wrong with the following code. It reads the binary from the database, stores it as a picture and associates with an object of an Animal record.

For each row (record of an animal):

byte[] ba = (byte[])x.ItemArray[1]; //reading binary from a DB row
using (MemoryStream m=new MemoryStream(ba))
 {
    Image i = Image.FromStream(m);  //exception thrown occassionally
    c.Photo = i;
    listOfAnimals.Add(c);
 }

First of all, with 18 pictures loaded (the JPG files have 105 Mb in total), the running app uses 2 gb of memory. With no pictures loaded, it is only 500 Mb. Often the exception gets raised in the marked point, the source of which is System Drawing.

Could anyone help me optimize the code or tell me what the problem is? I must have used some wrong functions...

Answer 1

According to Image.FromStream Method

OutOfMemoryException

The stream does not have a valid image format.

Remarks You must keep the stream open for the lifetime of the Image.

The stream is reset to zero if this method is called successively with the same stream.

For more information see: Loading an image from a stream without keeping the stream open and Returning Image using Image.FromStream

Try the following:

Create a method to convert byte[] to image

ConvertByteArrayToImage

public static Image ConvertByteArrayToImage(byte[] buffer) 
{
    using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream(buffer))
    {
        return Image.FromStream(ms);
    }
}

Then:

byte[] ba = (byte[])x.ItemArray[1]; //reading binary from a DB row
c.Photo = ConvertByteArrayToImage(ba);
listOfAnimals.Add(c);