Unity Garbage Collector Question

[sonic elbow]

From my understanding of the Unity C# garbage collector, it sounds like a bad pattern to allocate large (multiple MB) byte arrays regularly, say every couple of minutes during auto-save, even if they returned to GC shortly after being used, because Unity's GC never defragments memory.

If there are any smaller allocations afterwards that take up the space allocated for that byte array, the next time an array of a similar size or larger is requested it might have to take up some new space on the heap, and this would keep happening and the heap would grow continuously.

Would you guys agree that this is a problem and something like this shouldn't be done, and that memory should be reserved and reused instead of allocated each time

[flat pine]

It's a problem only if your game is already memory bottlenecked or you're expecting each session to run for a very long time/have an extreme number of such allocation in one session.
In practice, you need to "try it and see". If there is no actual issue in a production environment, then it's not a problem.

This is one of the things where you need to evaluate convenience vs actual issue potential on project basis.

[sonic elbow]

yes youre right, I will try to do some measuring and profiling to see if that is happening

[unborn lantern]

If you enable the incremental garbage collector, the cost will be divided over multiple frames and this will likely not be an issue.