Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Plugging Internet Explorer's Leaks

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the finger-in-the-dike dept.

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."

8 of 480 comments (clear)

  1. How about firefox? by moz25 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    see a Text Widget
    1. Re:How about firefox? by madaxe42 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:How about firefox? by ssj_195 · · Score: 4, Interesting
      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

  2. Not Microsoft's Fault by robojamie · · Score: 4, Funny

    The true source of IE memory leaks?

    Korean outsourcing

  3. Has anyone used firefox? by MaGGuN · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Everytime I try to download ten things firefox goes up to 300 megs of memory usage and 99% cpu usage. And I took the screenshots to prove it.

    Frankly, I think you can find problems and features you hate in most programs of a certain size, what matters is that you find the tool for the job that you consider the best match for your needs.

  4. Re:Quick and dirty fix by jrumney · · Score: 4, Funny
    Because computers use base-12 counting

    Please, tell us more about the fascinating workings of computers you seem to know so much about.

  5. Don't Bother by FellowConspirator · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you work around a problem, it hides from the user that the problem exists. The demand to have it fixed, therefore, dissipates and developers accept the onus to repeat work-arounds everytime they deploy something. Ultimately, the browser fails to improve, and the costs of errors are passed from the vendor (Microsoft) who never fixes the problem to the public (developers that waste time with work-arounds).

    Anyway, if you write things specifically for IE -- then you've already got a more serious problem that you have to address first. There's no excuse for what you already know to be dismal practice.

  6. Worst IE hammering and flamebait article ever by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful
    It seems to me people are now attacking IE now from 3 major angles:

    • Memory and resource usage
    • Rendering and adhering to web standards
    • Security

    IMHO, It's laughable to mock IE for memory leaks when Firefox is X (where X > 1) times worse at sucking up and retaining memory.

    People have relentlessly said the reason IE is faster to load than IE on Win32 is because it is "embedded into the OS" and somehow brushed off this advantage in favour of it's debateable disadvantage in terms of security. What's next? Will slashdotters crying out something along the lines of "WOW! IE, an embedded part of the Windows, has memory leaks! What does that say for the Operating System? You better use Linux!"?

    IE may be guilty of having a buggy implementation of web standards such as CSS2.1 but during the browser wars wasn't it IE producing functionality that hadn't even been drafted by the W3C yet?

    Isn't that "Internet Explorer's architecture made this app fairly easy to build." as testament to the browser?

    This tool is interesing and useful for developers and I thank jgwebber for writing it as I'm sure it'll be useful even to lowly personal developers like me.
    On the other hand i'm a bit baffled as to why this article wasn't simply written as "Hey IE has memory leaks, checkout this new tool by jgwebber and see for youself. Let's discuss how sucky Internet Explorer is and cover up all the flaws in competitor browsers".

    It would have had the same effect as CowboyNeal's unnecessary "(ha!)"'s and claims of IE's "horrendous memory leak issues" without a link giving some evidence for these claims for those of us without first-hand DHTML development experience.

    I truly wasn't aware of any serious IE memory leaks..i'm going to, go off and Google for information now using the cumbersome Firefox. Any links would be much appreciated since CowboyNeal didn't bother.