Does the CLR automatically detect if the garbage collector should be run in server mode?

Question

From a previous question I have seen that the CLR has workstation and server modes for its garbage collector. I know that these can be set from configuration using the gcServer element.

If you don't specify this, does the CLR use some magic to decide for you whether the garbage collector should run in server mode? Something based on CPU count, or memory profiling maybe?

Answer 1

Certainly not. The CLR runs in concurrent mode unless you explicitly tell it to do otherwise.

Answer 2

According to the documentation you linked to, the default is "false". I would expect this to be constant on all installations and instances, the MS documentation is pretty good on this sort of thing.

The only caveat is that perhaps the installer (or someone) sets this setting in the machine.config (for ASP.NET) to "true" on server O/S. This is pure speculation and probably is not the case.