Releasing generic collection memory for garbage collection

[DimkaNewtown]

Here's my situation, I have a collection of objects which have collections of objects several levels deep. When I am done working with these objects I call .Clear() method on the topmost object. MSDN2 states that this method will clear the collection and release object members for garbage collection. Does this mean that it's recursive and child collections will also be released or will the subsequent children still be alive and kicking in memory?

 

In pseudocode it would look someething like this (assume all members are exposed correctly):

 

[csharp]

class A

{

Collection<B> _b;

}

class B

{

Collection<C> _c;

}

class C

{

somevar = 1;

}

 

main

{

Collection<A> collA = new Collection<A>();

//load collection and its children, do processing

 

//time to unload

collA.Clear();

}

[/csharp]

 

Would that work fine or do I need to go through each child collection manually clearing it?

 

[csharp]

main

{

Collection<A> collA = new Collection<A>();

//load collection and its children, do processing

 

//time to unload

collA.B.C.Clear();

collA.B.Clear();

collA.Clear();

}

[/csharp]

 

My concern are the dangling objects which won't be picked up by the garbage collector until far far later.

[snarfblam]

The garbage collection works by reference tracing. It starts with "roots" (for example, a UI element, namely a form, would be a root since the user can interact with it and raise events or trigger function calls), and traces all the references. Any isolated objects (objects that do not have any delegates or references pointing to them, and therefore can not possibly interact with any other code or UI) or isolated groups of objects are collected. When you release an entire collection, as long as nothing else (that can be traced to from a root) has a reference to the items in the collection, they are available for garbage collection.

[DimkaNewtown]

Would it help to explicitely destroy (or at least dereference by setting to null) large child objects of the collection to facilitate faster memory reclamation or is it just a waste of time and code?

[PlausiblyDamp]

If the collection is going to go out of scope then I would just leave it to the GC entirely, otherwise setting the variable to null will allow the GC to collect it the next time it kicks in.

[DimkaNewtown]

Thanks everyone!