Discussion: Memory leak in NavigationView even though I cleared the child page element while unloading.

Discussion: Why memory leak occurs while displaying a custom code snippets view in a NavigationView’s child page.

Describe the bug

While using the NavigationView control to navigate child pages, the child page’s elements were cleared in its own unloading methods. But, the child pages retaining their memory after closing them.

Steps to reproduce the bug

1. Open and build the sample App8.zip with x86 or x64 architecture.
2. To take a memory leak report, click the Debug menu item and select the Performance Profiler in Visual studio.
3. Select the Memory Usage check box and click Start button
4. Visual studio will start the diagnostic session and launching the application
5. Click the TakeScreenshot button in the Visual Studio diagnostic session.
6. Click on the DemoList Navigation Menu Item in the application.
7. Click on the Code Snippets1 grid view item and its opens a code snippets page
8. Click on the Back app bar button
9. Repeat steps 7 and 8 for CodeSnippets 2andCodeSnippets 3
10. Click the Empty Page Navigation Menu Item.
11. Wait for 2 min and click the Force GC in the Visual Studio diagnostic session.
12. Click the TakeScreenshot button in the Visual Studio diagnostic session.
13. Then, click the Stop Collection

Memory leak report:

Expected behavior

Memory should be the same or low as the initial screenshot.

Version Info

NuGet package version: [WinUI 3 - Windows App SDK 0.8: 0.8.1]

Windows app type

WinRT

Windows version

October 2020 Update (19042)

Related Links

[l619534951]

Is this issue not a high priority? “WinUI 3 Gallery” and “PowerToys” also has this problem(WinAppSDK: 1.2).

[l619534951]

@vfib memory usage still increase when more than 500 MB, but the growth will slow down. if you continue navigation, your app will crash. (tested with WinAppSDK 1.3)

Powertoys can be used for testing, navigated to difference page many times, Powertoys will crash.

Temporary solutions is:

private void ContentFrame_Navigated(object sender, NavigationEventArgs e)
{
    System.GC.Collect();
}