WinForm App Uses More Memory When Deployed Through Installer

[peridian]

Hi,

We have a small Winforms app here that simply unpacks a zip file and transfers data from the files to a database.

When used through Visual Studio, or directly from the executable in the bin directory, or by directly using the executable from the Publish folder, the program builds up some memory usage and then releases it. Does this repeatedly.

When used via the installed deployment (i.e. when you use the .application file to install under %USER%/Local/Apps) the program never seems to release its memory, causing the memory usage to gradually increase until it uses all PC memory.

Does the VS supplied installer cause an app to do something differently with its resource allocation?

I am using VS2008 SP1, on Win7 SP1.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Regards,
Rob.

[Plater]

Are you doing any work with COM components?
Do you manually call the garbage collector ever?

[peridian]

No COM objects as far as I can tell, but the program does use multithreading to break up the reading of data from the files.

We don't deliberately call the garbage collector, although we did try this once thinking that the GC was not doing its job. However, since there are no guarantees that the GC will actually run even if you code a call to it, we were unable to determine if it is a GC problem or not. So we took the calls back out.

It appears to be this windows installer that causes the issue, so I have told our IT guys to just manually copy the files across instead of using the setup.

Regards,
Rob.