A number of people have written to [me] asking questions about their memory leak issues with DHTML (or AJAX) applications. Unfortunately, there's not much [I] could offer in the way of advice that most people don't already know. Get rid of closures, unhook your event handlers, etc. This advice just isn't all that helpful when you've got a giant mess of JavaScript (often inherited) and visually detecting leak scenarios can be maddeningly subtle.
[I] did, however, find it quite surprising that no one had ever built a leak detector for Internet Explorer (or apparently for any other browser with leak problems; Mozilla has some, but they seem to be more for developers working on Mozilla itself, and the browser does a pretty good job of cleaning up leaks anyway). So [I] built one.
Read More