What is the Memory Overhead of a Simple .NET Object?

Memory Overhead of a .NET Object

Understanding the memory footprint of an object in .NET is crucial for optimizing application performance and resource utilization. Let's explore the memory overhead of an arbitrary object represented as:

var obj = new System.Object();

Internal .NET Overheads

In the .NET Framework, each object incurs an internal overhead due to the following:

• Reference Tracking: Objects contain a pointer to the type descriptor, which tracks the object's metadata.
• Object Header: This header contains information such as the object's runtime type, synchronization lock, and garbage collection information.

Implementation-Specific Overhead

The specific memory overhead depends on the implementation of the Common Language Runtime (CLR). For the Microsoft .NET CLR v4:

• x86 CLR: Each object has a per-object overhead of 8 bytes.
• x64 CLR: Each object has a per-object overhead of 16 bytes.

Minimum Sizes

It's important to note that objects have minimum size requirements:

• x86 CLR: 12 bytes
• x64 CLR: 24 bytes

This means that even if an object does not store any data, it still occupies the minimum amount of space in memory.

Additional Insight

Refer to the blog post "Of memory and strings" for further details on this topic, including the impact of storing useful information in objects. Understanding the memory overhead of .NET objects is essential for efficient memory management and performance optimization in your applications.

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