Telling GC Lag from a Memory Leak in .NET — A Practical Procedure for Observing, Comparing, and Proving Memory Growth (archived 2026-07-27)

Key Points

• This research aims to establish a method for distinguishing between memory growth caused by garbage collection and actual memory leaks in .NET applications.
• Utilized dotnet-counters to monitor memory usage patterns.
• Employed dotnet-gcdump to analyze garbage collection metrics.
• Applied dotnet-dump to assess application memory states.
• Identified specific memory growth patterns attributed to garbage collection processes.
• Distinguished true memory leaks from benign memory usage based on diagnostic tools.
• Demonstrated the effectiveness of the outlined procedure in real-world .NET applications.