Crystal Report Basic for VS 2008 Memory Leak

Question

Hi,
I am having a problem with CR Basic for VS 2008.  I can display a report, which I have linked to an DataSet in C#, but when I close the window, I seem to have a memory leak, as verified by process explorer.
I am doing the following when the report window is closing:
myReportViewer.ReportSource = null;
myReportViewer.Dispose();
myReportObject.Close();
myReportObject.Dispose();
GC.Collect();
Any ideas?  I have a significant report that is generated and the memory leak is quite significant.
Thanks,
Dave

Answer 1

The memory management you are seeing is an artifact of how the framework manages memory allocations of managed dlls. These dlls are left in memory as it is expect that they may be used later on in your app and reloading these dlls would be a resource intensive process. It is difficult, if not impossible to unload managed dlls and there may not be a good solution.  However I suspect that once the managed dlls are loaded, you will see the memory moving in the 38,860 to 40,812 range. This memory will not be freed by the framework until the application is terminated.                                                                               
Couple of ideas:                                                                               
1) Trying to find resources on the possibility of unloading managed dlls. Apparently there is a way, but it is cumbersome. Couple of years ago, one of my coworkers spent some time on the issue and eventually gave upu2026 Looking around a bit, I have found the following links that may be of some use to you:                                                                               
http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2004/05/31/145105.aspx                                                                         
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/csharpgeneral/thread/a2682b53-12ad-4719-b05c-df1476cb39c9                             
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.appdomain.aspx ;                                                                      
http://www.discussweb.com/c-programming/2391-how-unload-both-managed-unmanaged-dll.html ;                                                                               
2) Try to see how the latest version of Crystal Reports behaves in your environment. Initially, I would suggest a test on a clean system with an eval version of Crystal Reports 2008. In CR 2008 we manage the memory via the crheapalloc.dll. So the behavior may be different. You can even try to see how CR 2008 behaves without the dll by simply renaming the dll.                                                                               
An eval download of CR 2008 is here:                                                                               
http://www.sap.com/solutions/sapbusinessobjects/sme/freetrials/index.epx                                                                               
Ludek