How to Detect Internet Explorer Memory Leaks
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With web applications pushing the technology to the limits, memory leak issues have gained prominence and need to be dealt with.
What is IE Memory Leak?
To begin with let me clarify that memory leaks are not restricted to Internet Explorer but it can happen in any browser. We are talking primarily about IE as over the course of my time, I have found it to cause this issue more often than any other browser.
Memory leak is a condition where your web application keeps consuming more and more memory as you keep navigating or refreshing. This causes decrease in responsiveness of the application and in situations can crash the browser itself.
Can we predict IE memory leaks?
Justin Rogers, a Microsoft employee, discusses in detail the patterns of memory leak in his article titled Understanding and Solving Internet Explorer Leak Patterns.
How can I try out and see memory leaks?
Please read Memory Leak in Internet Explorer - revisited which has code samples for you to try out and see for yourself.
How to test for memory leaks?
Drip, a memory leak detector for Internet Explorer, is a free open source tool available for download here.
It is an executable which can be downloaded and run directly.
(you can see in the graph above for www.Microsoft.com site that IE is continuously consuming more and more memory)
Start the application and enter the URL of the site you want to monitor. Click the “Auto Refresh” button. It will keep refreshing the site and plot the memory graph at the bottom.
How to diagnose memory leak issues?
There is a screencast on Diagnosing JavaScript Memory Leaks in IE which might be useful resource to start with.
Resources
Drip Home Page | Download Drip
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[...] How to Detect Internet Explorer Memory Leaks [...]
> To begin with let me clarify that memory leaks are not restricted to Internet Explorer
> but it can happen in any browser.
The reason IE leaks as much as it does is that INTERNET EXPLORER IS DEFECTIVE in it’s memory collection. As best I can tell, FF and Chrome reclaim *ALL* memory on a page after the page is refreshed or the tab is closed. In contrast IE leaks memory and *NEVER* reclaims it, hence you must exit IE and restart it.
As one whose pages download 1-2MB xml and construct HTML controls from it, the IE leak is an enormous problem. Workarounds like disposing of JS objects on the DOM tree, which take <2 seconds in FF & Chrome take 1.5 MINUTES in IE, which is where it’s required.
IE is horribly slowand buggy. But worst of all, IMO, the Microsoft article NEVER EVEN APOLOGIZES OR ADMITS THAT.