Impress your colleagues with your knowledge about... RecyclableMemoryStream.

Sometimes when working with C# you discover some hidden gems. Some of them very useful, other ones a little bit harder to find a good way to benefit from their functionality. One of those hidden gems that I discovered some days ago is the RecyclableMemoryStream class. For this one I’m cheating a little bit as it is not part of the .NET Framework directly but released as a separate NuGet package by the Bing team.

What is it?

Microsoft.IO.RecyclableMemoryStream is a drop-in MemoryStream replacement with superior behavior for performance-critical systems. In particular it is optimized to do the following:

• Eliminate Large Object Heap allocations by using pooled buffers
• Incur far fewer gen 2 GCs, and spend far less time paused due to GC
• Avoid memory leaks by having a bounded pool size
• Avoid memory fragmentation
• Provide excellent debuggability
• Provide metrics for performance tracking

The code looks kinda boring as it uses the same semantics as the built-in MemoryStream class:

	var sourceBuffer = new byte[]{0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7};
	var manager = new RecyclableMemoryStreamManager();
	using (var stream = manager.GetStream())
	{
	stream.Write(sourceBuffer, 0, sourceBuffer.Length);
	}

view raw RecyclableMemoryStream.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

More information: http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2015/02/06/announcing-microsoft-io-recycablememorystream/