jquery - Iframes and memory management in Javascript

Question

I have links that load pages into iframes. I have been monitoring the accumulation of data in memory using Google Chrome's memory heap profiler and I noticed some leaks in memory.

I loaded the page and took the first snapshot which added up to 2.69 MB. I clicked the link that opens a page into an iframe and took another snapshot giving me 14.58 MB in total. I removed the iframe using the following jquery snippet:

$('#myframe').unbind();
$('#myframe').remove();
/*
* By the way, I also tried $('#myframe > *') as a selector. 
* It still didn't work. Even if it would, it doesn't look like a viable solution to me.
* It looks too resource intensive.
*
* I forgot to mention that I am not using Ajax to load my pages
*/

I took another snapshot and got 5.28 MB which indicated a deviation of 2.59 MB from the initial value, which according to my understanding indicates memory leackage.

Now, my question is: If I remove an iframe (which includes the document loaded in it) doesn't the garbage collector find it necessary to also remove all the objects contained in that document from memory? Or will I have to do this manually?

I thought that if I load a document into an iframe, it's size will not affect the memory use on the parent page. I though it will be considered a separate window, but obviously that wasn't a well informed assumption on my part.

Any suggestions on how to tackle this?

Thank you.

Answer 1

In the iframe, trigger a reload before removing it and then remove it.

<a href="#">Remove</a>
<iframe src="url" />?

$('a').click(function(){
    $('iframe')[0].contentWindow.location.reload();
    setTimeout(function(){
       $('iframe').remove();
    }, 1000);
});?

DEMO here.

Addionally, you can do a manual cleaning up too - i.e. if you have data in your cookies or HTML5 localStorage.

window.onbeforeunload = function(){
    $(document).unbind().die();    //remove listeners on document
    $(document).find('*').unbind().die(); //remove listeners on all nodes
    //clean up cookies
    /remove items from localStorage
}