To Heap or not to Heap; That’s the Large Object Question?

This article is an investigation of Large Object Heap fragmentation. We outline a simple coding technique that goes directly to the OS with VirtualAlloc for large objects, avoiding the LOH altogether. We touch on the fact if a developer configures the machine to use Server Garbage Collection in Concurrent mode to reduce freezing of an application caused by garbage collection. We also touched on the fact if a developer were to manually compact the LOH from code; the compaction only occurs on the next blocking garbage collection. As a base starting point, we include a Sample Project implementing code for dealing with several common scenarios that can sometimes lead to excessive fragmentation of the LOH.