Find size of object instance in bytes in c#

Question

First of all, a warning: what follows is strictly in the realm of ugly, undocumented hacks. Do not rely on this working - even if it works for you now, it may stop working tomorrow, with any minor or major .NET update.

You can use the information in this article on CLR internals MSDN Magazine Issue 2005 May - Drill Into .NET Framework Internals to See How the CLR Creates Runtime Objects - last I checked, it was still applicable. Here's how this is done (it retrieves the internal "Basic Instance Size" field via TypeHandle of the type).

object obj = new List<int>(); // whatever you want to get the size of
RuntimeTypeHandle th = obj.GetType().TypeHandle;
int size = *(*(int**)&th + 1);
Console.WriteLine(size);

This works on 3.5 SP1 32-bit. I'm not sure if field sizes are the same on 64-bit - you might have to adjust the types and/or offsets if they are not.

This will work for all "normal" types, for which all instances have the same, well-defined types. Those for which this isn't true are arrays and strings for sure, and I believe also StringBuilder. For them you'll have add the size of all contained elements to their base instance size.

You may be able to approximate the size by pretending to serializing it with a binary serializer (but routing the output to oblivion) if you're working with serializable objects.

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        A parent;
        parent = new A(1, "Mike");
        parent.AddChild("Greg");
        parent.AddChild("Peter");
        parent.AddChild("Bobby");

        System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.BinaryFormatter bf =
           new System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.BinaryFormatter();
        SerializationSizer ss = new SerializationSizer();
        bf.Serialize(ss, parent);
        Console.WriteLine("Size of serialized object is {0}", ss.Length);
    }
}

[Serializable()]
class A
{
    int id;
    string name;
    List<B> children;
    public A(int id, string name)
    {
        this.id = id;
        this.name = name;
        children = new List<B>();
    }

    public B AddChild(string name)
    {
        B newItem = new B(this, name);
        children.Add(newItem);
        return newItem;
    }
}

[Serializable()]
class B
{
    A parent;
    string name;
    public B(A parent, string name)
    {
        this.parent = parent;
        this.name = name;
    }
}

class SerializationSizer : System.IO.Stream
{
    private int totalSize;
    public override void Write(byte[] buffer, int offset, int count)
    {
        this.totalSize += count;
    }

    public override bool CanRead
    {
        get { return false; }
    }

    public override bool CanSeek
    {
        get { return false; }
    }

    public override bool CanWrite
    {
        get { return true; }
    }

    public override void Flush()
    {
        // Nothing to do
    }

    public override long Length
    {
        get { return totalSize; }
    }

    public override long Position
    {
        get
        {
            throw new NotImplementedException();
        }
        set
        {
            throw new NotImplementedException();
        }
    }

    public override int Read(byte[] buffer, int offset, int count)
    {
        throw new NotImplementedException();
    }

    public override long Seek(long offset, System.IO.SeekOrigin origin)
    {
        throw new NotImplementedException();
    }

    public override void SetLength(long value)
    {
        throw new NotImplementedException();
    }
}

For unmanaged types aka value types, structs:

        Marshal.SizeOf(object);

For managed objects the closer i got is an approximation.

        long start_mem = GC.GetTotalMemory(true);

        aclass[] array = new aclass[1000000];
        for (int n = 0; n < 1000000; n++)
            array[n] = new aclass();

        double used_mem_median = (GC.GetTotalMemory(false) - start_mem)/1000000D;

Do not use serialization.A binary formatter adds headers, so you can change your class and load an old serialized file into the modified class.

Also it won't tell you the real size in memory nor will take into account memory alignment.

[Edit] By using BiteConverter.GetBytes(prop-value) recursivelly on every property of your class you would get the contents in bytes, that doesn't count the weight of the class or references but is much closer to reality. I would recommend to use a byte array for data and an unmanaged proxy class to access values using pointer casting if size matters, note that would be non-aligned memory so on old computers is gonna be slow but HUGE datasets on MODERN RAM is gonna be considerably faster, as minimizing the size to read from RAM is gonna be a bigger impact than unaligned.

safe solution with some optimizations CyberSaving/MemoryUsage code. some case:

/* test nullable type */      
TestSize<int?>.SizeOf(null) //-> 4 B

/* test StringBuilder */    
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) sb.Append("わたしわたしわたしわ");
TestSize<StringBuilder>.SizeOf(sb ) //-> 3132 B

/* test Simple array */    
TestSize<int[]>.SizeOf(new int[100]); //-> 400 B

/* test Empty List<int>*/    
var list = new List<int>();  
TestSize<List<int>>.SizeOf(list); //-> 205 B

/* test List<int> with 100 items*/
for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) list.Add(i);
TestSize<List<int>>.SizeOf(list); //-> 717 B

It works also with classes:

class twostring
{
    public string a { get; set; }
    public string b { get; set; }
}
TestSize<twostring>.SizeOf(new twostring() { a="0123456789", b="0123456789" } //-> 28 B

This doesn't apply to the current .NET implementation, but one thing to keep in mind with garbage collected/managed runtimes is the allocated size of an object can change throughout the lifetime of the program. For example, some generational garbage collectors (such as the Generational/Ulterior Reference Counting Hybrid collector) only need to store certain information after an object is moved from the nursery to the mature space.

This makes it impossible to create a reliable, generic API to expose the object size.

Not directly answers the question, but for those who are interested to investigate object sizes while debugging:

1. Start debugging in VS, make sure the "diagnostics" window is shown
2. Set a breakpoint (optional)
3. Click "take snapshot" in the "Memory usage" while paused
4. Explore the snapshot (optionally sort the object list alphabetically to find the type you're interested in)