HttpClient cipher in memory usage with big response

I am working on a console application that takes a list of endpoints for video data, makes an HTTP request, and saves the result to a file. These are relatively small videos. Due to a problem beyond my control, one of the videos is very large (in 145 minutes instead of a few seconds).

The problem I see is that my memory usage increases to ~ 1GB after calling this request, and I end up with a "Task was canceled" error (presumably because the client was timed out). This is ok, I don't want this video, but as far as my allocated memory stays high no matter what I do. I want to free memory. The task manager seems to show ~ 14MB of memory usage before this call and then expires continuously after that. In VS debugger, I see a splash.

I tried to throw everything in the expression using

by re-initializing the HttpClient

on exception , manually calling GC.Collect()

with no luck. The code I'm working with looks something like this:

consumer.Received += async (model, ea) =>
{
    InitializeHttpClient(source);
    ...
    foreach(var item in queue)
    {
        await SaveFileFromEndpoint(url, fileName);
        ...
    }
}

      

        
        
        
      

    

and methods:

public void InitializeHttpClient(string source)
{
    ...
    _client = new HttpClient();
    ...
}

public async Task SaveFileFromEndpoint(string endpoint, string fileName)
{
    try
    {
        using (HttpResponseMessage response = await _client.GetAsync(endpoint))
        {
            if (response.IsSuccessStatusCode)
            {
                using(var content = await response.Content.ReadAsStreamAsync())
                using (var fileStream = File.Create($"{fileName}"))
                {
                    await response.Content.CopyToAsync(fileStream);
                }
            }
        }
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {

    }
}

      

        
        
        
      

    

Here is my debugger output:

I think I have a few questions about what I see:

• Is memory usage really the problem?
• Is there a way to free memory allocated by a large HTTP request?
• Is there a way to see the length of the request content before the call is made and memory is allocated? So far, I haven't been able to find a way to find out until the actual memory is allocated.

Thanks in advance for your help!