How do I profile memory usage in my project

Question

Are there any good, free tools to profile memory usage in C# ?

Details:
I have a visualization project that uses quite large collections. I would like to check which parts of this project - on the data-processing side, or on the visualization side - use most of the memory, so I could optimize it.
I know that when it comes to computing size of the collection the case is quite simple and I can do it on my own. But there are also certain elements for which I cannot estimate the memory usage so easily.
The memory usage is quite big, for example processing a file of size 35 MB my program uses a little bit more than 250 MB of RAM.

Answer 1

I've had success using RedGate's ANTS profiler. It is also worth reading Brad Abrams blog where he has talked about profiling memory