"Duplicate Objects" Inspection and Value (struct) types.

Questions about YourKit .NET Profiler
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JeremyK
Posts: 7
Joined: Wed May 28, 2014 8:45 pm

"Duplicate Objects" Inspection and Value (struct) types.

Post by JeremyK »

I run the "Duplicate Objects" inspection against my application and I see the following:

System.Drawing.Color 1190 28536

Is that right? System.Drawing.Color is a value type (struct). So, while I may indeed have 1,190 different instances of the value in memory ... there's effectively nothing I can do about it (since they don't have any reference that could be shared).

Perhaps there could be some option to exclude value types from the "Duplicate Objects" checking?

(On the other hand, it is useful to count duplications of value types that happen to have been boxed).

Regards,

Jeremy
Anton Katilin
Posts: 6172
Joined: Wed Aug 11, 2004 8:37 am

Re: "Duplicate Objects" Inspection and Value (struct) types.

Post by Anton Katilin »

Hi Jeremy

Thank you for the suggestions.

We'll add the option exclude unboxed value types. I've added a feature request.
there's effectively nothing I can do about it (since they don't have any reference that could be shared).
In many cases you can do nothing about it, but not always.

For example, if you have millions of objects with an instance field of type Color which is the same in 95% of them, you may consider a class hierarchy with a method returning the color, which in the base class returns that most popular color (and thus does not allocate a field to store it), and a subclass to store a custom color in a field.

Another example: redundant data structures. The value type stored in each instance of class Foo is not actually a property of individual Foo, but is the same for all Foo instances belonging to the same FooGroup, and can instead be stored in there. If you have millions of Foo and only a few FooGroup this approach will same memory.

Anyway, the inspections, this one and others, just show some interesting facts about the application, interesting statistics, which hardly can be found by manually analyzing individual objects. It's up to developer interpreting the results to decide whether an improvement is needed and possible.

Best regards,
Anton
Anton Katilin
Posts: 6172
Joined: Wed Aug 11, 2004 8:37 am

Re: "Duplicate Objects" Inspection and Value (struct) types.

Post by Anton Katilin »

Hi Jeremy

Newest builds offers the option to exclude unboxed value types.

Best regards,
Anton
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