How to dispose of a variable?

"" is an empty string. It has a string termination character and a pointer to physical address space for the string.

Nothing/Null is truly non-existant. There's no address space involved and no end-of-string character. IIRC, there's still a pointer but it's set to null.

It's a bit more efficient to set a variable to "" if you're going to reuse it later as you don't need to get a new address. If you're not going to use it later, setting it to Nothing/Null will save 32 or 64 bits of initial address space.

Remember that when a script ends, all memory space except that used by objects is rleased into the pool. The exception would be sripts invoked via server.execute or includes that will use the same memory space as the calling script.

EDIT: Stuff like timers are double-words to begin with so you gain a little more my setting them to nothing/null.


Edited by dpyers - 09 October 2006 at 4:04am

You can't set an object to a null string unless it's a string however, the nature of VB.NET is that it is strongly typed.
The only way to get a .NET class to release its resources is to call the .Dispose() method when you're done with it.