bcquality/community/knowledge/performance/avoid-growing-globals-in-singleinstance-subscribers.md
Jeremy Vyska 47a189e61c Seed community performance and security knowledge
Ports 14 concern-sized articles (8 performance, 6 security) and 25
AL samples from BC Code Intelligence, restructured to BCQuality's v1
schema and layered under /community/knowledge/. Each article is
atomic, under 100 lines, and ships <slug>.good.al and (where the
pattern has a clear anti-example) <slug>.bad.al siblings.

Jesper's microsoft-layer leaves (al-performance-review and
al-security-review) source across every enabled layer via
*/knowledge/<domain>/**, so these additions are picked up by the
existing action skills without any new skill definitions.

Performance (8):
  - use-deleteall-for-filtered-bulk-deletion
  - call-setloadfields-before-filters
  - load-common-fields-before-branching-on-case
  - load-only-primary-key-fields-for-reference-work
  - omit-filter-only-fields-from-setloadfields
  - choose-maintainsiftindex-by-read-write-ratio
  - avoid-growing-globals-in-singleinstance-subscribers
  - order-case-branches-by-frequency

Security (6):
  - classify-every-field-with-dataclassification
  - protect-sensitive-data-in-temporary-tables
  - guard-bulk-operations-with-istemporary
  - compose-permission-sets-with-included-sets
  - do-not-grant-rights-beyond-a-users-entitlement
  - prefer-oauth2-over-api-keys-for-external-http-calls

Graveyard-bound items (not ported; to be captured in a later
/docs/triage-graveyard.md):
  - testfield-performance (soft guidance, low actionability)
  - table-event-batch-operation-impact (keep-event-subscribers-lightweight
    already carries the core insight)
  - Most of /roger-reviewer (AL formatting - frontier-model territory)
  - sift-technology-fundamentals (descriptive, not a citable concern)
  - bc-telemetry-buddy-* (tooling promotion, not guidance)

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-04-19 18:13:32 +02:00

1.7 KiB

bc-version domain keywords technologies countries application-area
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performance
singleinstance
subscriber
event
memory
session
al
w1
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Avoid growing globals in SingleInstance subscribers

Seed article. Ported from BC Code Intelligence to seed the community corpus. Community contributors are invited to expand or refine.

Description

A codeunit with SingleInstance = true is allocated once per session and lives until the session ends. Global variables on it are never collected between event fires. A subscriber that accumulates data into a global — buffering payloads, appending to a list, caching without a cap — steadily grows its session footprint for the entire user session. The symptom is memory that only recovers on sign-out, and it surfaces only on long-running sessions.

Best Practice

Keep the global footprint on a SingleInstance subscriber bounded and intentional: a handful of flags, a setup record, a bounded cache with a maximum size. When cross-event state is genuinely needed, define an explicit reset point — end of a business process, arrival of a specific terminal event — that clears the growing collection.

See sample: avoid-growing-globals-in-singleinstance-subscribers.good.al.

Anti Pattern

A SingleInstance subscriber that appends each event's payload to a global list, dictionary, or temporary record without a cap or cleanup trigger. The list grows for hours, memory pressure builds quietly, and debugging the root cause on a live environment is substantially harder than noticing the unbounded append in code review.

See sample: avoid-growing-globals-in-singleinstance-subscribers.bad.al.