Subj : Memory Leak
To   : netscape.public.mozilla.jseng
From : Curtis Beattie <spaceshaker.geo@yahoo.com>
Date : Thu Mar 11 2004 11:59 am

I'm not sure if this is the proper forum for this type of question. The 
company I work for has developed a 100% Javascript application 
development framework (approx. 29k lines of code). We are running into 
memory leak issues with mozilla when running our application. It appears 
that mozilla is not freeing memory after the application has run. The 
only way to free the memory is to shutdown mozilla (closing all mozilla 
windows).

In order to better test this we created the following test function:

var MAX_INDEX = 200000;

function runTest() {
         var strs = [];

         for(var i = 0; i < MAX_INDEX; ++i) {
         	strs.push('A relatively long string containing ' + i + ' as a 
randomizer');
         }

         for(var j = 0; j < MAX_INDEX; ++j) {
         	delete strs[j];
         }

         delete strs;
}

In the above test, mozilla eats up 60MB of RAM and does not release it 
even upon reload or changing pages. As I mentioned above it only 
releases only when you shut down mozilla. We tested the same script on 
IE 6 and it does not suffer from the same problem (it releases the 
memory as soon as the function is complete).

We have been able to replicate this problem on Mozilla 1.4, 1.6 and 
Firefox 0.8. Any input would be greatly appreciated.

.