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Day 6— .NET Performance Series
Pros and Cons of Using string.Intern() in Production
Discover how string.Intern() in C# can drastically reduce memory usage in large-scale .NET applications. Learn best practices, pitfalls, and real-world implementation tips for high-throughput systems.
4 min readApr 20, 2025
Access the complete performance series here
It started with a slow memory leak. Nothing too dramatic at first. A few more megabytes used here, a few more there. But by the time the service had been running for a few hours under production load, memory usage was swelling like a balloon, showing no signs of plateauing.
This was a mission-critical microservice, one of the backbone APIs in a distributed system that processed tens of thousands of user-submitted data entries every minute. Naturally, every byte of memory mattered — especially at scale.
