Solving an OutOfMemoryException

time to read 5 min | 858 words

The following code generates an OutOfMemoryException in certain circumstances (see my previous post about it):

private string ReplaceParametersWithValues(string statement, bool useComment)
{
  if (sqlStatement.Parameters == null)
    return statement;

  foreach (var parameter in sqlStatement.Parameters
            .Where(x => x != null && x.Name.Empty() == false)
            .OrderByDescending(x => x.Name.Length))
  {
    var patternNameSafeForRegex = Regex.Escape(parameter.Name);
    var pattern = patternNameSafeForRegex + @"(?![\d|_])";
    //static Regex methods will cache the regex, so we don't need to worry about that
      var replacement = useComment ? 
                parameter.Value + " /* " + parameter.Name + " */" : 
                parameter.Value;
      statement = Regex.Replace(statement,
                  pattern,
                  replacement);
  }
  return statement;
}

When trying to resolve this, I had to adjust my assumptions. The code above was written to handle statements of 1 – 5 kilobytes with up to a dozen or two parameters.

But it started crashing badly with a statement of 190 Kilobyte and 4 thousands parameters. It is fairly obvious that this method generates a lot of temporary strings. Probably leading to GC pressure and a lot of other nasty stuff beside. Unfortunately, there isn’t a set of Regex API for StringBuilder, so I had to make do with my own approach.

I chose a fairly brute force approach for that, and I am sure it can be made better, but basically, it is just using a StringBuilder and doing the work manually.

private string ReplaceParametersWithValues(string statement, bool useComment)
{
  if (sqlStatement.Parameters == null)
    return statement;
  var sb = new StringBuilder(statement);
  foreach (var parameter in sqlStatement.Parameters
            .Where(x => x != null && x.Name.Empty() == false)
            .OrderByDescending(x => x.Name.Length))
  {
    var replacement = useComment ?
      parameter.Value + " /* " + parameter.Name + " */" :
      parameter.Value;

    int i;
    for ( i = 0; i < sb.Length; i++)
    {
      if(sb[i] != parameter.Name[0])
        continue;
      int j;
      for (j = 1; j < parameter.Name.Length && (j+i) < sb.Length; j++)
      {
        if (sb[i + j] != parameter.Name[j])
          break;
      }
      if (j != parameter.Name.Length)
        continue;

      if ((i + j) >= sb.Length || char.IsDigit(sb[i + j]) == false)
      {
        sb.Remove(i, parameter.Name.Length);
        sb.Insert(i, replacement);
        i += replacement.Length - 1;
      }
    }
  }
  return sb.ToString();
}

The code is somewhat complicated due to the check that I need to make, I can’t just use sb.Replace(), because I need to replace the value if it isn’t followed by a digit.

At any rate, this code is much more complicated, but it is also much more conservative in terms of memory usage.