![]() But that left a large amount of memory used by strings generated from source code. Our first work on memory optimization focused on the relationships, the links between data, and metadata stored for each symbol, and we did indeed reduce the memory they used. While relationships between symbols can be stored with relatively little memory, strings themselves take up a lot of space in memory. It stores the names of all your symbols: classes, variables and so forth. Visual Assist parses your solution and creates what we call the ‘symbol database’, which is what’s used for almost every operation – find references, refactoring, our syntax highlighting (which understands where symbols are introduced), generating code, etc. Background – Where Visual Assist Uses Memory OS architecture including processes, threads, virtual memory etc is a fascinating topic. If you’re really familiar with those concepts, we hope you’ll forgive us for such a short introduction. It is isolated from other processes, both in permissions and memory addresses: that is, two processes do not share the same memory address space. This is important because it means that any address you use has what backs it, where it actually points to, under Window’s control.Ī process is how your application is represented by the operating system: it is what has the virtual address space above, and contains one or more threads which are the code that runs. The operating system looks after mapping the logical address, the address your application uses, to the actual location in RAM. Pieces of it can be stored anywhere, including on disk (swapped out) and loaded in when needed. This means that the 4GB is not actually a sequential block of memory in RAM. This address space is a virtual address space the application uses virtual memory. Plus, there are techniques to access more memory than this even on 32-bit systems, which is getting ahead of where this blog post is going.) On a 64-bit version of Windows, a 32-bit app has the entire 4GB available. (This is hand-wavy – although true, on 32-bit versions of Windows this 4GB was split between kernel and user mode, and a normal app can only access usermode memory depending on settings, this actually meant your app could access only 2GB or 3GB of memory before it could not allocate any more. So we say that a 32-bit process has a 32-bit address space, or an address space of 4GB. ![]() It’s usually limited by the size of a pointer (because a pointer points to memory): a 32-bit pointer can address 2 32 ( about 4 billion) bytes, which is 4GB. Feel free to skip to the next section if you’re already familiar.Īddress space refers to the total amount of memory an application can use. ![]() Many readers may know this, but to follow this post here’s a quick primer on some concepts. Chunk / Block Structure and Allocation / Freeing.Background – Where Visual Assist Uses Memory.Plus, it’s just part of being a good member of the Visual Studio ecosystem: as an extension relied on by thousands of developers, yet sitting in the same shared process as other tools, we should have as little impact as we can. It’s a change we think will help many of you who are reading this, because those with large solutions who run into memory issues should find those memory issues alleviated or disappearing completely and those with small or medium solutions may find Visual Assist runs a little faster. The latest version of Visual Assist ( build 2393, ) reduces in-process memory consumption significantly. Sometimes, with all of these things squashed into one process’ memory space together, some users with large and complex projects start running out of memory. A lot of Visual Assist is built around analysis of your solution, and that requires storing data about your source code, what we call the symbol database. A typical game developer, for example, may have a large solution, plus perhaps the Xbox and Playstation SDKs, plus other tools – already using a lot of memory – plus Visual Assist. ![]() Visual Assist is an extension which lives inside Visual Studio, and Visual Studio is a 32-bit process, meaning that its address space, even on a modern 64-bit version of Windows, is limited to a maximum of 4GB. Written by David Millington (Product Manager), Goran Mitrovic (Senior Software Engineer) and Christopher Gardner (Engineering Lead) November 2020’s release of Visual Assist had some significant memory usage improvements, great for those with large projects.
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