Comments on: Memory leak caused by setTimeout

By: unsure

unsure — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 01:41:55 +0000

“Calling clearTimeout does allow the commands to become eligible for garbage collection. It’s odd that this call is necessary to clear the references that are keeping it alive. Once a timeout ends, I would expect the player to do whatever clearTimeout is doing behind the scenes since that timeout won’t be used again. Thank you for your suggestion.”
Where I have been able to read about this?

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 13:17:10 +0000

In this case one timer would definitely be enough. In the end I simplified things further by only having one instance of my command. When the timer ticks out I call execute again rather than re-dispatching the event. I just found is problematic that something that looked like it should have been garbage collected wasn’t.

By: lwz7512

lwz7512 — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 02:30:15 +0000

I think the local timer variable is the source of memory leak.

var pollTimer:Timer

you should turn it to a global variable, and the whole app has only one timer, one is enough!

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 14:04:33 +0000

You’re right, Richard. Calling clearTimeout does allow the commands to become eligible for garbage collection. It’s odd that this call is necessary to clear the references that are keeping it alive. Once a timeout ends, I would expect the player to do whatever clearTimeout is doing behind the scenes since that timeout won’t be used again. Thank you for your suggestion.

By: Richard Butler

Richard Butler — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 07:12:22 +0000

Have you tried saving the timeout ID and then force clearing it using clearTimeout() in the poll() method? Does it still keep the instances in memory?