Always something with memory management...

I've been working on this Photo Album Web Service for some time now. I started it about a year ago, and then I stopped working on it last May when I went to intern at Microsoft on the Windows team. So, I decided that I'd finally pick it up again and start updating it.

First order of business was upgrading the DIME support that I had in the Web Service and the Administration application that I have for the Web Service. DIME is this great proposed standard that essentially is MIME for SOAP messages. Back a year ago the support for it was really poor, so when I saw that Microsoft released its Web Services Enhancements SDK 1.0 a few months ago, I knew immediately that this would be on the top of my list to update in the Photo Album Web Service. Anyway, I just moved over to using ws-Attachments (DIME) with the WSE. It's quite phenomenal how far this has come from the inital implementation from 01/2002.

The next order of business was to finally do that memory optimization that I've been meaning to do for some time. Well, simply put, this Photo Album Web Service isn't a light Web Service to be running. It takes the original file (say a 3.1 magapixel JPG from my digital camera) and dynamically does resizing for thumbnails, etc. I really hated having to make thumbnails on my own, so, this does it for me automatically now. Anyway, with a JPG of about 1 Mb in size, this gets very memory intensive. So, needless to say, I went around fixing code I had initally left without memory optimization. I've known for some time that it's generally good practice to call .Dispose() on any objects that have the IDisposable interface implemented, so, I just went around calling .Dispose() where appropriate and
the results show it... about a 5500% memory perf increase! Woohoo!! (Yes, that's
alot... this is in one test that I did with a category with many photos... in
any case, this may not be the case for all categories with less or more photos in them, but this is a good sign anyway. :))