In my experience it seems that most people will tell you that it is unwise to force a garbage collection but in some cases where you are working with large objects that don't always get collected in the 0 generation but where memory is an issue, is it ok to force the collect? Is there a best practice out there for doing so?
C# – Best Practices for Forcing Garbage Collection
.netc++garbage-collection
Related Solutions
Unless you can confirm that the garbage collector is actively slowing the performance of your application, you should not take steps to cripple the functionality of your runtime environment.
Judging from your question, you have not confirmed that the GC is a problem. I severely doubt that it is.
Optimize only what needs to be optimized.
Here are some articles detailing problems with the Large Object Heap. It sounds like what you might be running into.
Dangers of the large object heap:
http://www.simple-talk.com/dotnet/.net-framework/the-dangers-of-the-large-object-heap/
Here is a link on how to collect data on the Large Object Heap (LOH):
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc534993.aspx
According to this, it seems there is no way to compact the LOH. I can't find anything newer that explicitly says how to do it, and so it seems that it hasn't changed in the 2.0 runtime:
http://blogs.msdn.com/maoni/archive/2006/04/18/large-object-heap.aspx
The simple way of handling the issue is to make small objects if at all possible. Your other option to is to create only a few large objects and reuse them over and over. Not an idea situation, but it might be better than re-writing the object structure. Since you did say that the created objects (arrays) are of different sizes, it might be difficult, but it could keep the application from crashing.
Best Answer
The best practise is to not force a garbage collection.
According to MSDN:
However, if you can reliably test your code to confirm that calling Collect() won't have a negative impact then go ahead...
Just try to make sure objects are cleaned up when you no longer need them. If you have custom objects, look at using the "using statement" and the IDisposable interface.
This link has some good practical advice with regards to freeing up memory / garbage collection etc:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/66x5fx1b.aspx