OutOfMemory Exception when debugging

Question

I'm running a very small program that throws "System.OutOfMemoryException" when there's clearly a lot of memory available:

Under the task manager, I got plenty of memory left, and the process is taking around 45MB.

Is there a way to increase this process memory limit?

EDIT1:

I moved some code around, and this made the error get triggered in many different spots. The latest, after loading a form and filling it with data from the database, I just change from one tab to another in a TabControl and that triggers the exception.

I'm using Entity Framework 6 and a Postgres database, if that helps. Maybe the framework is creating too many instances of objects and I'm running out of memory indexes.

That's why I think the code itself is not relevant to the question.

EDIT2:

I took another screenshot of the memory analyser before and after the exception occurs:

So the problem is that I'm getting over 100K objects in memory, and I'm not having enough memory pages to create new ones? I'm still quite lost on how to handle this.

EDIT3:

Well, I found the culprit of the memory leak: Entify Framework. The memory consumption increase happens after I first load data from the database. Now I'll have to properly debug if the problem is in the Postgre driver or on Entity Framework itself. Will have to test with a different database to check.

Here's two screenshots showing the difference before and after I use EF. The code loads some items in two comboboxes, both using the same List as a datasource. On the first example. I have EF, on the second I loaded the same types of objects, but creating them myself, no connection to the database. The difference is astonishing!

EDIT 4:

Well, this is embarassing. I moved to a different solution. Now I'm working with Simple.Migration to manage changes in the database, and Dapper (with Dapper.Contrib) to handle CRUD. Hope they see this and maybe see what's going wrong...

Answer 1

Memory usage can be different from memory reserved . The system can reserve memory (it says "I have dibs on that megabyte") but not actually utilize it. I'm not certain whether Visual Studio shows the memory usage or reserved, but you can check it through Task Manager, going to the Performance tab, and clicking the Resource Monitor button near the bottom of the window. The Memory tab in the Resource Monitor window will show how much memmory is commited.

If you have this problem, and I bet you do, then you are repeatedly declaring something and not instantiating or deleting it, or you are adding endless objects to a list. It's most likely happening inside a loop. It is very unlikely that Visual Studio is hitting a memory limit, unless your computer is a potato.