How can I determine the size of an Entity collection and its entities in memory? (adapter)

Thank you

This is very tricky, as you can't measure managed objects size in memory. You can serialize to a memoryStream, but this won't be acurate at all. You can use Marshal.SizeOf to return the unmanaged size of an object in bytes.

Please check this discussion for more info: http://bytes.com/topic/c-sharp/answers/238927-object-size-memory

Will Marshal.SizeOf include nested objects and their properties as well?

why would you want to know the size in bytes?

We were going to run some tests to see memory usage between EntityCollections vs custom classes holding only necessary data for caching purposes.

A work wround is to run your application in both cases, each time loading a colletion of 1000 objects, and check the Windiows Task Manager for memory allocated to the running process of your application. This way you can spot the differences.

To know the byte sizes, use a memory profiler, like Ants or dotTrace. Also use the latest v2.6 build instead of v2.5 or earlier.