Ajax heavy JS apps using excessive amounts of memory over time.
- by Shane Reustle
I seem to have some pretty large memory leaks in an app that I am working on. The app itself is not very complex. Every 15 seconds, the page requests approx 40kb of JSON from the server, and draws a table on the page using it. It is cheaper to draw the table over because the data is usually always new. I am attaching a few events to the table, approx 5 per line, 30 lines in the table. I used jQuery's .html() method to put the new html into the container and overwrite the existing. I do this specifically so that jQuery's special cleanup functions go in and attempt to detach all events on the elements in the element that it is overwriting. I then also delete the large variables of html once they are sent to the DOM using delete my_var.
I have checked for circular references and attached events that are never cleared a few times, but never REALLY dug into it. I was wondering if someone could give me a few pointers on how to optimize a very heavy app like this. I just picked up "High Performance Javascript" by Nicholas Zakas, but didn't have much time to get into it yet.
To give an idea on how much memory this is using, after 4~ hours, it is using about 420,000k on chrome, and much more on Firefox or IE.
Thanks!
