It is a very common issue for people beginning to use EF or other O/RMs to have serialization trigger lazy loading and then have big chunks of data loaded into memory and serialized that were not intended to be there. We added the ability to turn off lazy loading as a flag in the context mainly for this reason. When lazy loading was enabled for the first time in EF4, we put a lot of guidance out there, e.g.:
* http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/dd456853(v=vs.100).aspx
* http://blogs.msdn.com/b/adonet/archive/2010/01/05/poco-proxies-part-2-serializing-poco-proxies.aspx
But the most current EF documentation doesn’t seem to discuss the issue any more in those terms. While I was able to find an explanation of how to turn off lazy loading (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/data/jj574232) I couldn't find an explanation of the motivations to do so.
* http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/dd456853(v=vs.100).aspx
* http://blogs.msdn.com/b/adonet/archive/2010/01/05/poco-proxies-part-2-serializing-poco-proxies.aspx
But the most current EF documentation doesn’t seem to discuss the issue any more in those terms. While I was able to find an explanation of how to turn off lazy loading (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/data/jj574232) I couldn't find an explanation of the motivations to do so.