Memory leak involving jQuery Ajax requests

Question

I have a webpage that's leaking memory in both IE8 and Firefox; the memory usage displayed in the Windows Process Explorer just keeps growing over time.

The following page requests the "unplanned.json" url, which is a static file that never changes (though I do set my Cache-control HTTP header to no-cache to make sure that the Ajax request always goes through). When it gets the results, it clears out an HTML table, loops over the json array it got back from the server, and dynamically adds a row to an HTML table for each entry in the array. Then it waits 2 seconds and repeats this process.

Here's the entire webpage:

<html> <head>
    <title>Test Page</title>
    <script type="text/javascript"
     src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3/jquery.min.js"></script>
</head> <body>
<script type="text/javascript">
    function kickoff() {
        $.getJSON("unplanned.json", resetTable);
    }
    function resetTable(rows) {
        $("#content tbody").empty();
        for(var i=0; i<rows.length; i++) {
            $("<tr>"
                + "<td>" + rows[i].mpe_name + "</td>"
                + "<td>" + rows[i].bin + "</td>"
                + "<td>" + rows[i].request_time + "</td>"
                + "<td>" + rows[i].filtered_delta + "</td>"
                + "<td>" + rows[i].failed_delta + "</td>"
            + "</tr>").appendTo("#content tbody");
        }
        setTimeout(kickoff, 2000);
    }
    $(kickoff);
</script>
<table id="content" border="1" style="width:100% ; text-align:center">
<thead><tr>
    <th>MPE</th> <th>Bin</th> <th>When</th> <th>Filtered</th> <th>Failed</th>
</tr></thead>
<tbody></tbody>
</table>
</body> </html>

If it helps, here's an example of the json I'm sending back (it's this exact array wuith thousands of entries instead of just one):

[
    {
        mpe_name: "DBOSS-995",
        request_time: "09/18/2009 11:51:06",
        bin: 4,
        filtered_delta: 1,
        failed_delta: 1
    }
]

EDIT: I've accepted Toran's extremely helpful answer, but I feel I should post some additional code, since his removefromdom jQuery plugin has some limitations:

It only removes individual elements. So you can't give it a query like `$("#content tbody tr")` and expect it to remove all of the elements you've specified.
Any element that you remove with it must have an `id` attribute. So if I want to remove my `tbody`, then I must assign an `id` to my `tbody` tag or else it will give an error.
It removes the element itself and all of its descendants, so if you simply want to empty that element then you'll have to re-create it afterwards (or modify the plugin to empty instead of remove).

So here's my page above modified to use Toran's plugin. For the sake of simplicity I didn't apply any of the general performance advice offered by Peter. Here's the page which now no longer memory leaks:

<html>
<head>
    <title>Test Page</title>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3/jquery.min.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
    $.fn.removefromdom = function(s) {
        if (!this) return;

        var el = document.getElementById(this.attr("id"));

        if (!el) return;

        var bin = document.getElementById("IELeakGarbageBin");

        //before deleting el, recursively delete all of its children.
        while (el.childNodes.length > 0) {
            if (!bin) {
                bin = document.createElement("DIV");
                bin.id = "IELeakGarbageBin";
                document.body.appendChild(bin);
            }

            bin.appendChild(el.childNodes[el.childNodes.length - 1]);
            bin.innerHTML = "";
        }

        el.parentNode.removeChild(el);

        if (!bin) {
            bin = document.createElement("DIV");
            bin.id = "IELeakGarbageBin";
            document.body.appendChild(bin);
        }

        bin.appendChild(el);
        bin.innerHTML = "";
    };

    var resets = 0;
    function kickoff() {
        $.getJSON("unplanned.json", resetTable);
    }
    function resetTable(rows) {
        $("#content tbody").removefromdom();
        $("#content").append('<tbody id="id_field_required"></tbody>');
        for(var i=0; i<rows.length; i++) {
            $("#content tbody").append("<tr><td>" + rows[i].mpe_name + "</td>"
                + "<td>" + rows[i].bin + "</td>"
                + "<td>" + rows[i].request_time + "</td>"
                + "<td>" + rows[i].filtered_delta + "</td>"
                + "<td>" + rows[i].failed_delta + "</td></tr>");
        }
        resets++;
        $("#message").html("Content set this many times: " + resets);
        setTimeout(kickoff, 2000);
    }
    $(kickoff);
// -->
</script>
<div id="message" style="color:red"></div>
<table id="content" border="1" style="width:100% ; text-align:center">
<thead><tr>
    <th>MPE</th>
    <th>Bin</th>
    <th>When</th>
    <th>Filtered</th>
    <th>Failed</th>
</tr></thead>
<tbody id="id_field_required"></tbody>
</table>
</body>
</html>

FURTHER EDIT: I'll leave my question unchanged, though it's worth noting that this memory leak has nothing to do with Ajax. In fact, the following code would memory leak just the same and be just as easily solved with Toran's removefromdom jQuery plugin:

function resetTable() {
    $("#content tbody").empty();
    for(var i=0; i<1000; i++) {
        $("#content tbody").append("<tr><td>" + "DBOSS-095" + "</td>"
            + "<td>" + 4 + "</td>"
            + "<td>" + "09/18/2009 11:51:06" + "</td>"
            + "<td>" + 1 + "</td>"
            + "<td>" + 1 + "</td></tr>");
    }
    setTimeout(resetTable, 2000);
}
$(resetTable);

Toran Billups · Accepted Answer

I'm not sure why firefox isn't happy w/ this but I can say from experience that in IE6/7/8 you must set innerHTML = ""; on the object you want removed from the DOM. (if you created this DOM element dynamically that is)

$("#content tbody").empty(); might not be releasing these dynamically generated DOM elements.

Instead try something like the below (this is a jQuery plugin I wrote to solve the issue).

jQuery.fn.removefromdom = function(s) {
    if (!this) return;

    var bin = $("#IELeakGarbageBin");

    if (!bin.get(0)) {
        bin = $("<div id='IELeakGarbageBin'></div>");
        $("body").append(bin);
    }

    $(this).children().each(
            function() {
                bin.append(this);
                document.getElementById("IELeakGarbageBin").innerHTML = "";
            }
    );

    this.remove();

    bin.append(this);
    document.getElementById("IELeakGarbageBin").innerHTML = "";
};

You would call this like so: $("#content").removefromdom();

The only issue here is that you need to re-create your table each time you want to build it.

Also, if this does solve your issue in IE you can read more about this in a blog post that I wrote earlier this year when I came across the same problem.

Edit I updated the plugin above to be 95% JavaScript free now so it's using more jQuery than the previous version. You will still notice that I have to use innerHTML because the jQuery function html(""); doesn't act the same for IE6/7/8

Peter Bailey · Answer

I'm not sure about the leak, but your resetTable() function is very inefficient. Try fixing those problems first and see where you end up.

Don't append to the DOM in a loop. If you must do DOM manipulation, then append to a document fragment, and then move that fragment to the DOM.
But innerHTML is faster than DOM manipulation anyway, so use that if you can.
Store jQuery sets into local variables - no need to re-run the selector every time.
Also store repeated references in a local variable.
When iterating over a collection of any sort, store the length in a local variable, too.

New code:

<html> <head>
    <title>Test Page</title>
    <script type="text/javascript"
     src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3/jquery.min.js"></script>
</head> <body>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(function()
{
    var $tbody = $("#content tbody");

    function kickoff() {
        $.getJSON("test.php", resetTable);
    }

    function resetTable(rows)
    {
        var html = ''
          , i = 0
          , l = rows.length
          , row;
        for ( ; i < l; i++ )
        {
            row = rows[i];
            html += "<tr>"
                + "<td>" + row.mpe_name + "</td>"
                + "<td>" + row.bin + "</td>"
                + "<td>" + row.request_time + "</td>"
                + "<td>" + row.filtered_delta + "</td>"
                + "<td>" + row.failed_delta + "</td>"
            + "</tr>";
        }
        $tbody.html( html );
        setTimeout(kickoff, 2000);
    }

    kickoff();
});
</script>
<table id="content" border="1" style="width:100% ; text-align:center">
<thead>
    <th>MPE</th> <th>Bin</th> <th>When</th> <th>Filtered</th> <th>Failed</th>
</thead>
<tbody></tbody>
</table>
</body> </html>

References:

jQuery Peformance Rules
Speed Up Your Javascript

Memory leak involving jQuery Ajax requests

Tags:

javascript

jquery

ajax

memory-leaks

Eli Courtwright

2 Answers

Toran Billups

Peter Bailey

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Memory leak involving jQuery Ajax requests

Tags:

javascript

jquery

ajax

memory-leaks

Eli Courtwright

2 Answers

Toran Billups

Peter Bailey

Related questions

Recent Activity

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