Comments on: Screencast: Diagnose a JavaScript Memory Leak in the Windows IE Browser

By: pat

pat — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 01:14:04 +0000

Yep, the JavaScript garbage collector works correctly, it’s only the IE DOM garbage collector that has a bug. From Douglas Crockford’s article JScript Memory Leaks: “The JavaScript garbage collector understands about cycles and is not confused by them. Unfortunately, IE’s DOM is not managed by JScript. It has its own memory manager that does not understand about cycles and so gets very confused. As a result, when cycles occur, memory reclamation does not occur.”

By: pat

pat — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 19:22:53 +0000

@Mark: thanks for the tip. I did a quick experiment, and it didn’t trigger a bigger memory leak when I added data to the tabber object; however, when I attached data to the DOM element I got a bigger memory leak. This leads me to believe that the memory leak occurs in the DOM but the JavaScript object is correctly garbage-collected. I’ll have to do a little more research.

By: Mark Wubben

Mark Wubben — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 18:37:05 +0000

Interesting way to detect the memory usage. I’ve got one small tip though, Instead of creating a hundred tabs you could add a huge object to the tabber instance. Say, a string which is hundreds of thousands of characters long. If you make it big enough you’ll see a several megabyte increase of memory usage on every reload.