Why does the memory consumed by the Mono process keep growing?
Mono currently uses a conservative, non-moving, non-compacting garbage collector. This means that the heap is not compacted when memory is released. This means that applications can produce memory allocation patterns that will effectively make the process grow, just like C, C++, Perl, Python applications would. It is hence important to not get into patterns that would create these holes, for example such a hole could be created if you create a block of size SIZE, release it, and then create two blocks of size SIZE/2+1. ASP.NET in Mono is particularly vulnerable to this kind of memory problems because it is easy for developers to define APIs that transfer large blobs of data like entire image files, these would allocate a lot of memory that can easily be fragmented. A simple solution is to try to write your software in a way that large data blocks are not allocated, but instead your application handles them in blocks (like writing a “copy” command).
