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Junior — Middle

What methods can cause heap memory overflow?

sobes.tech AI

Answer from AI

Memory leak on the heap in C# can be caused by the following ways:

  • Creating a very large number of objects without releasing them — for example, creating new objects in an infinite loop and keeping references to them so that the garbage collector cannot delete them.
  • Creating very large objects — such as large arrays or strings that do not fit into available memory.
  • Recursive object creation with retained references — if recursion leads to creating new objects at each step and references to them are kept, it can quickly exhaust memory.

Example of infinite object creation:

List<byte[]> list = new List<byte[]>();
while(true)
{
    list.Add(new byte[1024 * 1024]); // adding 1MB each time
}

This will lead to heap memory overflow and eventually throw an OutOfMemoryException.