It happened when I got an email from the service manager “User for an application we host are intermittently failing to login during peak login period in the morning. The same users have no problem to login at other times and no particular group of users or locations are identified. The users are accessing via Citrix.
The support team have been trying to reproduce the error by login in multiple times and they cannot reproduce consistently. They even had 30-40 session active on the test box and they could not reproduce and the test box has available memory”.
The first thing I wanted to to see the actual error seen by the users and any logs. The support folks sent this through and the error came with a stack trace which had this at the bottom:
at System.Text.StringBuilder..ctor(String value, Int32 startIndex, Int32 length, Int32 capacity)
Exception of type ‘System.OutOfMemoryException’ was thrown.
What string builder is doing is allocating space for holding a string. You can get an OutOfMemoryException if you try to allocate a string length greater than the capacity but this level of programming error would probably occur at any time not at the peak. As this is the login process it should be pretty consistent.
I think the issue here is to do with the limit on virtual memory rather than physical memory. I mocked up a .NET 4.5 app on my PC that grabs 0.5G of string storage after each key press. Here is a code snippet below:
int capacity = 250000000;
int maxCapacity = capacity + 1024;
StringBuilder stringBuilder1 =
new StringBuilder(capacity, maxCapacity);
Console.WriteLine(GC.GetTotalMemory(false));
Console.ReadKey(true);
There where two scenarios I found that generated the OutOfMemory exception
Exceeding the Process Address Space
The test app process is limited to 4G of memory and when that is exceeded I get the out of memory error. However, I don’t think this is your issue as the problem occurs only during heavy usage.
Committed bytes is exceeded
Committed bytes is the total amount of memory available on the Physical RAM and the Page File. I get the error when the perfmon counter % Committed byes in Use reaches 100% as the process cannot find any spare memory for the next 0.5G of string storage. Below you can see when the issue occurs:
The answer was simply to increase the committed bytes limit which means an increase in the paging file size.
1202Performance 