I’ve been meaning to write up an article on writing a high performance long running service using .Net for a while now as that lead me down the road (of no return 
)of my interactions with the .Net garbage collector. On that note I just saw that Andrew Hunter wrote up a blog on “Understanding Garbage Collection in .NET“. This is an excellent visual high level primer on .Net garbage collection, and I see absolutely no reason to attempt to duplicate his work (especially as he is blatantly better at graphics than me!).
Interestingly for me also is that while this concept applies to both Microsoft .Net runtimes and Mono they do behave differently, well they have different GC collection algorithms at any rate and there are implications for that. I may cover that as a separate topic in a later blog as well (more Blog promises… everyone tells me not to do that )
Gareth