Memory leak on CollectionView.View.Refresh

Answer 1

Step one in troubleshooting memory leaks is to find the definitive source. This is not always obvious and can occasionally defy your intuition. Based on your explanation, if you remove your user control, the issue disappears, but when you put it back, you start leaking again. This very likely points to a memory leak within that control (though not necessarily). Perhaps your control fits into one of the many types of WPF memory leaks, or you have a more classic problem of subscribing to an event but not properly unwiring it when no longer needed (the weak event pattern is useful here).

Your best bet is to grab a tool like .NET Memory Profiler or ANTS Memory Profiler (both are excellent and have free trials). Use one of these tools find the objects that are hanging around after they should be gone. These tools provide help in tracing the chain of objects that are hanging onto your object. There are many good articles on memory profiling on their sites, here on SO and on the wide open web.

Answer 2

You could try 2 things:

First of all the DropShadow has some problems, as it hold some references that should be garbadge collected.. see this article for more information: http://blog.ramondeklein.nl/index.php/2009/02/20/memory-leak-with-wpf-resources-in-rare-cases/

You can try to set th HasDropShadow to false, and see what happens with your memory.

Secondly, if we have multiple ContextMenu objects of the same menu, you might want to create a ContextMenu resource in your Resources, and reference it with the StaticResource extension like so:

<ContextMenu Background="Transparent" Width="325" Opacity=".8" x:Key="MyAwesomeContextMenu">

      <PrivateMessengerUI:MyUserData IsReadOnly="True" >

          <PrivateMessengerUI:MyUserData.DataContext>

              <Binding Path="."/>

          </PrivateMessengerUI:MyUserData.DataContext>

     </PrivateMessengerUI:MyUserData>

</ContextMenu>

And use it where you defined your context menu:

ContextMenu="{StaticResource MyAwesomeContextMenu}"

Hope this helps a bit!