A word of warning regarding manual GC

I was party to an email conversation discussing manual manipulation of the GC.  Originally the thread was discussing extreme memory and performance management.  Stephen Cohen, Senior Architect at Microsoft added the following response:

A quick word of warning;

Calling the GC is possible but generally not wise. In many scenarios you will find performance drops. Worse yet, the GC is not limited to a single application (unless you are the only application on a device/server). Calling GC might seem good for you but what about any other application that could be impacted?

In my experience wanting to call the GC directly should raise a flag on the application design and set of a deep design review to investigate before implementing a change. With rare exception you can find a way to manage the flow of data, the size of chunks, number of instances, use of critical sections or parallel processing, etc that will remove the need to call the GC.

That said, it can be done but you should allocate a lot of time to test with enough instrumentation that you can both validate a positive result … better performance than the baseline… and confirm no negative side effects.

Manipulating the GC will affect other .NET applications running on the server.