Memory snapshot triggers Garbage collection in dotMemory

Question

I'm using dotMemory to profile asp.net mvc application running on IIS.

And I suspect that 'get snapshot' causes GC gen2 to run. Why? Here is the picture:

Question is: is it normal behaivour? Why can't I get snapshot showing me all this uncollected by GC stuff? Every time I gets snapshot: memory usage falls down.

Answer 1

Yes, this is the normal behavior, because it does a full garbage collection before getting a snapshot. If you see memory usage falls down when you get a snapshot, that's a good sign.

Garbage collector cleans memory only if there is a memory stress. If you want to check for memory leaks you have to execute a full garbage collection and get a snapshot. If anything remains that's a memory leak.

Generally you should get a clean base snapshot and then another clean snapshot after you executing the functionality you want to test and then compare both snapshots.