Lambda methods and implicit context

The C# compiler is lazy, which is usually a very good thing, but that can also give you some issues. We recently tracked down a memory usage issue to code that looked roughly like this.

var stats = new PerformatStats
{
    Size = largeData.Length
};
stats.OnCompletion += () => this.RecordCompletion(stats);
Write(stats, o =>
{
    var sp = new Stopwatch();
    foreach (var item in largeData)
    {
        sp.Restart();
        // do something with this
        stats.RecordOperationDuration(sp);
    }
});

On the surface, this looks good. We are only using largeData for a short while, right?

But behind the scene, something evil lurks. Here is what this actually is translated to by the compiler:

__DisplayClass3 cDisplayClass3_1 = new __DisplayClass3
{
    __this = this,
    largeData = largeData
};
cDisplayClass3_1.stats = new PerformatStats { Size = cDisplayClass3_1.largeData.Length };
cDisplayClass3_1.stats.OnCompletion += new Action(cDisplayClass3_1, __LambdaMethod1__);
Write(cDisplayClass3_1.stats, new Action(cDisplayClass3_1, __LambdaMethod2__));

You need to pay special attention to what is going on. We need to maintain the local state of the variables. So the compiler lift the local parameters into an object. (Called __DisplayClass3).

Creating spurious objects is something that we want to avoid, so the C# compiler says: “Oh, I’ve two lambdas in this call that need to get access to the local variables. Instead of creating two objects, I can create just a single one, and share it among both calls, thereby saving some space”.

Unfortunately for us, there is a slight issue here. The lifetime of the stats object is pretty long (we use it to report stats). But we also hold a reference to the completion delegate (we use that to report on stuff later on). Because the completion delegate holds the same lifted parameters object, and because that holds the large data object. It means that we ended up holding a lot of stuff in memory far beyond the time they were useful.

The annoying thing is that it was pretty hard to figure out, because we were looking at the source code, and the lambda that we know is likely to be long running doesn’t look like it is going to hold a referece to the largeData object.

Ouch.