I am new to remoting and looking at what format to use to serialize my
objects. I thought I'd do some tests and I can't understand why I am
getting the results that I am. I am simply serializing a single int
and it seems to take 54 bytes, not 4 as I would expect. If I were
serializing a non-primitive object, I could understand that there's
some header info etc., but a primitive?

Also if I serialize 10 ints, it scales linearly and takes 540 bytes.

Maybe I am using the MemoryStream class wrong?
Thanks, Hugh

Here's the simple code:

try {
  IFormatter formatter = new BinaryFormatter();
  MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream();

  int nTest=7;
  formatter.Serialize(stream, nTest);

  // this prints 54, not 4 as I would expect!
  Debug.WriteLine(stream.Length);

  // aby.Length is also 54...
  byte[] aby = stream.ToArray();
} catch (Exception ex) {
  Debug.WriteLine(ex.Message);
}