dotnetcore – Chuck Conway

Microsoft is adding a new feature to C# 8 called Nullable Reference Types. Which at first, is confusing because all reference types are nullable… so how this different? Going forward, if the feature is enabled, references types are non-nullable, unless you explicitly notate them as nullable.

Let me explain.

Nullable Reference Types

When Nullable Reference Types are enabled and the compiler believes a reference type has the potential of being null, it warns you. You’ll see warning messages from Visual Studio:

And build warnings:

To remove this warning, add a question mark to the back for the reference type. For example:

public string StringTest()
{
    string? notNull = null;
    return notNull;
}

Now the reference type behaves as it did before C# 8.

This feature is enabled by adding #nullable enable to the top of any C# file or adding lt;NullableReferenceTypes>true</NullableReferenceTypes> to the .csproj file. Out of the box it’s not enabled, which is a good thing if it was enabled any existing code-base would likely light up like a Christmas tree.

The Null Debate

Why is Microsoft adding this feature now? Nulls have been part of the language since, well the beginning? Honestly, I don’t know why. I’ve always used nulls, it’s a fact of life in C#. I didn’t realize not having nulls was an option… Maybe life will be better without them. We’ll find out.

Should you or should you not use nulls? I’ve summarized the ongoing debate as I understand them.

For

The argument for nulls is generally that an object has an unknown state. This unknown state is represented with null. You see this with the bit data type in SQL Server, which has 3 values, null (not set), 0 and 1. You also see this in UI’s, where sometimes it’s important to know if a user touched a field or not. Someone might counter with, “Instead of null, why not create an unknown state type or a ‘not set’ state?” How is this different than null? You’d still have to check for this additional state. Now you’re creating unknown states for each instance. Why not just use null and have a global unknown state?

Against

The argument against nulls is it’s a different data type and must be checked for each time you use a reference type. The net result is code like this:

var user = GetUser(username, password);

if(user != null)
{
    DoSomethingWithUser(user);
} else 
{
    SetUserNotFoundErrorMessage()
}

If the GetUser method returned a user in all cases, including when the user is not found. If the code never returns null, then it’s a waste guarding against it and ideally, this simplifies the code. However, at some point, you’ll need to check for an empty user and display an error message. Not using a null doesn’t remove the need to fill the business case of a user not found.

Is this Feature a Good Idea?

The purpose of this feature is NOT to eliminate the use of nulls, but to instead ask the question: “Is there a better way?” And sometimes the answer is “No”. If we can eliminate the constant checking for nulls with a little forethought, which in turn simplifies our code. I’m in. The good news is C# has made working with nulls trivial.

I do fear some will take a dogmatic stance and insisting on eliminating nulls to the detriment of a system. This is a fool’s errand, because nulls are integral to C#.

Is Nullable Reference Types a good idea? It is, if the end result is simpler and less error prone code.

Memory management in modern languages is often an afterthought. For all intents and purposes, we write software without nary a thought about memory. This serves us well but there are always exceptions…

In California, there are extensive financial reporting requirements for Local Education Agencies (LEA), an LEA can be a county, a district, a charter or a single school. Most LEAs create their own financial reports which are usually centered around Excel, it’s no surprise when each report is different. To solve this problem the California Board of Education commissioned software to generate financial reports.

I was a part of the development team.

My first stop was the testing logs, Ed-Pro’s logs pointed to high memory usage, perhaps there was a memory leak? An engineer observed that Ed-Pro’s calculations used a large amount of short-lived memory. If the memory wasn’t cleaned up quickly, it could appear like a memory leak.

Ed-Pro is built on top of .Net Core, Microsoft’s multi-platform framework. In .Net Core, memory is divided into three categories: Short-lived (Gen0), medium lived (Gen1), and long-lived (Gen2). Gen0 is for short-lived data that quickly goes out of scope, Gen1 is for medium lived memory that hangs around for a bit longer, it too also eventually goes out of scope and Gen2 is long-lived memory that may live for the life of the application. Gen0 memory is constantly reclaimed, Gen1 is reclaimed less frequently than Gen0, and Gen2 is reclaimed even less frequently than Gen1.

The only sure way to understand the memory usage of Ed-Pro was to profile it, below is a screenshot using dotMemory by JetBrains.

As suspected, we found large amounts of Gen0 memory (the blue), so much so, it appeared that Garbage Collection couldn’t keep up. A strategy to compensate for a large amount of memory, caused Garbage Collection to oscillated between increasing memory space (adding more memory for the application’s use) and cleaning it up. During the cleanup cycles, the application is unresponsive.

At first, we were stumped, isn’t the purpose of the GC to keep memory tidy? Two articles were instrumental in our understanding of how Garbage Collection works in .Net: Mark Vincze’s article Troubleshooting high memory usage with ASP.Net Core on Kubernetes and Fundamentals of Garbage Collection by Microsoft. Both are great reads and brought clarity to the memory usage in Ed-Pro.

Here’s a summary of what we learned, there are two types of Garbage Collection in .Net: Server Garbage Collection and Workstation Garbage Collection.

Server Garbage Collection makes a couple of assumptions: First, there is ample memory available and second, the processors are multi-core and are fast. Both can be true, but we live in a world of virtual machines and Docker where it’s more likely that both assumptions are false.

Server Garbage Collection allows memory to build, at some point, it does one of two things: it either increases the memory space allowing memory to grow or it frees up orphaned memory. When it chooses to free memory, the Garbage Collection starts the process on a high priority thread. The high priority thread is a higher priority than the application; if the machine is fast, the clean up shouldn’t be noticed. However, if it’s not, it’ll cause the application to halt until the clean up is completed.

Workstation Garbage Collection operations differently. It continuously runs reclaiming memory on a thread with the same priority as the application. This means it’s also competing for resources with the application which can cause application slowness. The upside is the application’s memory usage can stay quite low, primarily when it uses large amounts of Gen0.

As a default, if .Net Core detects a server, it runs the Server Garbage Collection type, which was the case with our application. To run the Workstation Garbage Collection type add the following snippet to your project file:

  <PropertyGroup> 
    <ServerGarbageCollection>false</ServerGarbageCollection>
  </PropertyGroup>

We made this configuration change to Ed-Pro, using dotMemory, we profiled Ed-Pro’s memory with Workstation Garbage Collection enabled and loaded the same screens as in the previous test. Here are the results:

The memory usage is significantly decreased. The Gen0 allocations are virtually non-existent. Beyond the differences in the graph, the Server Garbage Collection memory usage topped 1 gig while the Workstation Garbage Collection topped at roughly 200 megs.

Every application is different. Our application used a ton of temporary data and thus uses a ton of Gen0 memory. Your application may leverage longer lived memory such as Gen1 or Gen2 in which Server Garbage Collection makes a whole lot of sense. My advice is to profile your memory under different conditions for an idea of how memory is used and then decide which mode is best for you application.

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Tag: dotnetcore

C# 8 – Nullable Reference Types

Nullable Reference Types

The Null Debate

For

Against

Is this Feature a Good Idea?

Garbage Collection Types in .Net Core