What strategies and tools are useful for finding memory leaks in .NET?

Question

I use Scitech's MemProfiler when I suspect a memory leak.

So far, I have found it to be very reliable and powerful. It has saved my bacon on at least one occasion.

The GC works very well in .NET IMO, but just like any other language or platform, if you write bad code, bad things happen.

Just for the forgetting-to-dispose problem, try the solution described in this blog post. Here's the essence:

    public void Dispose ()
    {
        // Dispose logic here ...

        // It's a bad error if someone forgets to call Dispose,
        // so in Debug builds, we put a finalizer in to detect
        // the error. If Dispose is called, we suppress the
        // finalizer.
#if DEBUG
        GC.SuppressFinalize(this);
#endif
    }

#if DEBUG
    ~TimedLock()
    {
        // If this finalizer runs, someone somewhere failed to
        // call Dispose, which means we've failed to leave
        // a monitor!
        System.Diagnostics.Debug.Fail("Undisposed lock");
    }
#endif

We've used Ants Profiler Pro by Red Gate software in our project. It works really well for all .NET language-based applications.

We found that the .NET Garbage Collector is very "safe" in its cleaning up of in-memory objects (as it should be). It would keep objects around just because we might be using it sometime in the future. This meant we needed to be more careful about the number of objects that we inflated in memory. In the end, we converted all of our data objects over to an "inflate on-demand" (just before a field is requested) in order to reduce memory overhead and increase performance.

EDIT: Here's a further explanation of what I mean by "inflate on demand." In our object model of our database we use Properties of a parent object to expose the child object(s). For example if we had some record that referenced some other "detail" or "lookup" record on a one-to-one basis we would structure it like this:

class ParentObject
   Private mRelatedObject as New CRelatedObject
   public Readonly property RelatedObject() as CRelatedObject
      get
         mRelatedObject.getWithID(RelatedObjectID)
         return mRelatedObject
      end get
   end property
End class

We found that the above system created some real memory and performance problems when there were a lot of records in memory. So we switched over to a system where objects were inflated only when they were requested, and database calls were done only when necessary:

class ParentObject
   Private mRelatedObject as CRelatedObject
   Public ReadOnly Property RelatedObject() as CRelatedObject
      Get
         If mRelatedObject is Nothing
            mRelatedObject = New CRelatedObject
         End If
         If mRelatedObject.isEmptyObject
            mRelatedObject.getWithID(RelatedObjectID)
         End If
         return mRelatedObject
      end get
   end Property
end class

This turned out to be much more efficient because objects were kept out of memory until they were needed (the Get method was accessed). It provided a very large performance boost in limiting database hits and a huge gain on memory space.

You still need to worry about memory when you are writing managed code unless your application is trivial. I will suggest two things: first, read CLR via C# because it will help you understand memory management in .NET. Second, learn to use a tool like CLRProfiler (Microsoft). This can give you an idea of what is causing your memory leak (e.g. you can take a look at your large object heap fragmentation)