Plugging Internet Explorer's Leaks

jgwebber writes "If you're developing DHTML web apps, you probably already know first-hand that Internet Explorer has horrendous memory leak issues. You can't not run on IE, so you've got to find a way to plug those leaks. So I've created a tool to help you find them. So until Microsoft decides to fix its browser architecture (ha!), at least we can keep it from blowing huge amounts of memory."

How about firefox?

[moz25]

Is such an approach also useable for finding firefox leaks? As a user (not developer, alas) I'm noticing that it invariably gets sluggish after some period of time, even with few pages open.

Re:How about firefox?

[madaxe42]

I'm fairly certain there's a leak somewhere in teh FF javascript handler - I've noticed memory usage rocketing on some pages which use JS.

Um..I'll have a shot

[SimianOverlord]

because it's your job?

I don't know why you geeks have such a downer on Microsoft for writing buggy software. If it didn't, do you have any idea about how many of you would be out of a job? The capitalisation that flows from Microsofts inability to write good operating systems is immeasurable. If it worked first time - would there be any engineers?

It's sort of analogous to cruise liners. Used to be, because ships weren't terribly well made, a clipper had a huge crew of dirty, scurvey suffering swabbers. Nowadays, you have one captain and a big computer. Currently, IT graduates, computer consultants and systems administraters are that huge crew of disease ridden reprobates, serving on the creaking, rotten, old fashioned Microsoft vessel. And all you want is to be out of a job?

Where's the logic in that??

Re:How about firefox?

[ssj_195]

There were many, many leaks in Firefox, and many have been fixed for 1.1 (do a search on their Bugzilla for "memory leak"). Hopefully, the situation is now much-improved, but I suspect it will be the case that long periods of heavy-browsing will require you to to restart Firefox for quite a while yet. For this reason, I always recommend the Session Saver extension - makes closing and restarting Firefox less painful.

Memory fragmentation is a big issue for modern desktop systems as the heap used by programs written in C/C++ can't be compacted, and most memory allocation systems weren't necessarily designed to support programs that would be continually allocating and deallocating memory for days on end. Robert Love gave a (fairly detailed and technical) talk on it at while back, with some suggestions for combating it on the Linux desktop, which I recommend to anyone who is interested. It's about 126MB, Ogg format.

http://stream.fluendo.com/archive/6uadec/Robert_Lo ve_-_Optimizing_GNOME.ogg [fluendo.com]

Re:Has anyone used firefox?

[Errtu76]

Haven't noticed the memory issue, but i can confirm the cpu usage being 99%. In my case it was caused by an embedded Flash movie on the site. As soon as i closed that (or even rightclicked within the flash movie and choose 'stop' or whatever) things went back to normal.

Re:NOOB...

[Anonymous Coward]

On un*x the memory is returned when you close the app. Usually that is the case on NT based (XP is just NT 5.1) systems as well. In Windows 9x normal memory is often returned but USER/GDI (only 64k of each) memory that has been leaked is lost until the next reboot. In Windows 3.x once USER/GDI memory is used by an app it can never be freed even if the app is very well behaved and tries to free all memory on exiting.

Re:How about firefox?

[Taladar]

Without being too familar with Javascript I am reasonably sure Javascript uses Memory too like any other programming language on the planet.

Re:Worst IE hammering and flamebait article ever

[ArsenneLupin]

I truly wasn't aware of any serious IE memory leaks..

You soon will... Even if jgwebber had the best of intentions when he wrote the tools (help Web developers write their javascript in such a way as too be easy on IE's leaky memory manager), I'm quite sure that is not what it will be used for in most cases. Quite the contrary! How long until we'll see a new flurry of "worst viewed with Internet Exploder" sites that throw your PC into a swap orgy seconds after they opened up and showed you their obgoats?

Re:Worst IE hammering and flamebait article ever

[dtfinch]

We have a kiosk running an html application in IE6. It uses lots of javascript and the front page reloads every couple minutes when idle. It's been running for 6 months on 64mb of ram with no issues. The same browser window has been open all that time.

I remember one time writing a page which by accident, hit a memory leak in Mozilla (before there was a FireFox) which consumed about 1mb of ram a second. All the page did was draw a bouncing line, by creating a div for every line pixel of every frame and displaying them by setting the innerHTML property of another div. IE had no trouble with the page, except that it required some ugly hacks to make the page display correctly, unlike Mozilla, which displayed it perfectly as I had specified in the CSS, albiet leaky.

Re:Making sites not run on IE

[Anonymous Coward]

As a married adult male with a large mortage and steady job..no. The difference is that I'm in the UK and you are most certainly in the US. From what I've seen of banks whenever I've visted the states, the banks themselves actively hate their customers and seem to enjoy making life difficult. Whereas here in the UK the banks only secretly hate you, but almost everything is automatic (Wages are paid via. BACS, bills are paid by Direct Debit, almost everyone has a Debit Card). In general there is very little reason to ever have to interact with your bank in the UK, and when you do it's usually face to face. Besides checking your monthly statement(s), everything takes care of itself (Most of the time).