Growing in the "Virtual bytes" performance counter

Question

Hi, I am suffering from an "Out of memory" exception in my Windows Service after running it for few hours under huge workload. I used the following performance counters to detect memory leaks:

• # bytes in all heap
• Private bytes
• Virtual bytes

The first 2 counters are going up and down regularly ... I cant see anything wrong in them. but the 3rd one is growing very slowly by time, the counter is going up and down too but at the end it is increasing by time. What does that mean?

My Win Service is .NET which is calling some functions from a C++ DLL and also using a 3rd party which have some unmanaged code in it.

Does this indicate a memory leak in the managed code / unmanaged code ? or simply this wont help?

Thanks

Answer 1

Take a look at the clr profiler so you can monitor your usage. If it only crashes under hudge load there may not be an error so much as a new design constraint to handle the load.