My website eats RAM (client's RAM) like a fat boy eats cake and I suspect it's due to javascript running functions every second. Anyone know how I can stop this? I've used all browsers and it's the same across the board. Site opens and within 10min 50MB+ of RAM is use... 1 hour later and about half a gig is gone.

make sure that objects are destroyed when finished is the first thing.


Second is:

WHY are you running scripts every second?????????

Thanks, I'll look into it
it's an ajax powered live chat that I made myself

setInterval is not a very efficient function, which I assume you must be using to make repeated requests. It consumes a lot of resources when it runs for a long time, though there could be some other bottlenecks in your code.

Maybe you should consider letting the chat go into "idle mode", where if there is no mouse movement after a certain time it stops requesting new information from the server.

Do you mind linking to the code, or are you keeping it private?

Aha! Ok. do you reuse the XMLHTTP object or recreate it on each iteration?


BTW Java applets are more suited to "chat" systems because they run in the context of the JVM which is more efficient on resource use than browsers are.

You may want to read this: How JavaScript Timers Work because he specifically talks about timers and how they work on the browser level, especially when used in conjunction with asynchronous events, which includes clicks and mouse movement other mouse events, not just the XMLHttpRequest object.

Originally Posted by wayfarer07

setInterval is not a very efficient function, which I assume you must be using to make repeated requests. It consumes a lot of resources when it runs for a long time, though there could be some other bottlenecks in your code.

Maybe you should consider letting the chat go into "idle mode", where if there is no mouse movement after a certain time it stops requesting new information from the server.

Do you mind linking to the code, or are you keeping it private?

That's exactly what I'm doing! It's nothing special, just a setInterval that loads a php page into a div every 1 second.

I've been browsing the web recently and found this
http://www.ape-project.org/

would implementing that solve my problem? and are there other alternatives?

From How JavaScript Timers Work

setTimeout(function(){
/* Some long block of code... */
setTimeout(arguments.callee, 10);
}, 10);

setInterval(function(){
/* Some long block of code... */
}, 10);


These two pieces of code may appear to be functionally equivalent, at first glance, but they are not. Notably the setTimeout code will always have at least a 10ms delay after the previous callback execution (it may end up being more, but never less) whereas the setInterval will attempt to execute a callback every 10ms regardless of when the last callback was executed.

I think you should use free chat services like cbox.

that way you will not get RAM problem due to javascript.

Originally Posted by wayfarer07

From How JavaScript Timers Work

I finally got a chance to implement it... it looks like it works

Thanks for the help!

So did this solve your memory problem also?

Originally Posted by wayfarer07

So did this solve your memory problem also?

It solved the memory problem for me! =)

Only thing though... it caused another problem =(

So now whenever someone types something in a form on the site characters are skipped when typing the moment the div associated with the above script refreshes... I find that this only happens on the firefox browser (chrome works fine... IE is just crap so I don't care about that). Any ideas?

edit: LOL I just tested the site in IE and guess what... no problems! So I guess it's just firefox

any ideas on this one? I've never heard of javascript affecting non-javascript using form elements

Originally Posted by MoForce

any ideas on this one? I've never heard of javascript affecting non-javascript using form elements

You could set it to run default in Firefox by CSS, if that is an option in what you are doing.

Originally Posted by SpecHosting

You could set it to run default in Firefox by CSS, if that is an option in what you are doing.

How do you do that?

Google is great. Heres a link to show you how to do this! Hope it helps. http://www.thesitewizard.com/css/excludecss.shtml

Wow, thanks for posting that link SpecHosting! I had no idea that you could have a different stylesheet for each browser..lol.