What is the Memory Overhead of a .NET Object?

Memory Overhead of a .NET Object

In the .NET runtime, an object's memory overhead refers to the additional space occupied by its internal .NET workings and references. Understanding this overhead is crucial for memory management in .NET applications.

Per-Object Overhead

According to Microsoft's documentation for the .NET CLR v4, the memory overhead for a single object is implementation-specific. Specifically:

• x86 CLR: 8 bytes per object
• x64 CLR: 16 bytes per object

However, there are minimum sizes for objects:

• x86 CLR: 12 bytes
• x64 CLR: 24 bytes

These minimum sizes include the 8 or 16 bytes of per-object overhead. Therefore, the first 4 or 8 bytes of an object's memory are allocated for its internal .NET structures.

Additional Information

For a more comprehensive discussion on memory overhead in .NET, refer to the blog post "Of memory and strings". The overhead can vary depending on the number of references and other factors. It is essential to consider this overhead when optimizing memory usage in your .NET applications.

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