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What options are available in C#/.NET to get the status of an installed printer? The only information we need is if the printer is on or off (we have a little indicator on the screen that says 'Printer ready' or 'Printer offline').

Our application is a small client running on an embedded PC. We've found that the WMI Windows process is running out of memory. Watching it on my development PC there appears to be a memory leak as the amount of memory it uses slowly creeps up. On an embedded device with limited memory this is unacceptable and we're finding after a couple of hours the application crashes.

Adam
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    have you tried to deal with the memory leaks? – Daniel A. White Jun 22 '11 at 14:17
  • It's the WMI process (wmiprvse.exe) that is increasing so it appears the memory leak is outside of my control. I'm executing the following in a loop every second:- `ManagementObjectSearcher searcher = new ManagementObjectSearcher("SELECT * FROM Win32_Printer"); foreach (ManagementObject printer in searcher.Get()) { // Checking the name of the printer and firing an event with the value of the work offline property }` – Adam Jun 22 '11 at 15:05
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    it still could be that your code isn't releasing the other end. try using only one `ManagementObjectSearcher ` – Daniel A. White Jun 22 '11 at 15:22
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    I have also tried the approach of only having a single static instance of the ManagementObjectSearcher, but I'm still seeing the WMI process continue to grow. – Adam Jun 22 '11 at 15:28

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I would try to resolve the memory leak, but if you cant find it, you could always use PInvoke calls (specifically GetPrinterData). See an example here (Note: There are also WMI posts that could help you compare what you have and see if you can find the memory leak)

Community
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SwDevMan81
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