JavaScript

Why are leaks a problem? Because the RAM leaked by a page will remain in use until the browser is closed. For developers of websites with heavy JavaScript usage, memory leaks can be a nightmare. I once worked on a site that would climb to hundreds of megabytes after a few pages of data loaded in through Ajax. Then, the RAM would continue to stay in use until I closed and restarted the browser.

The IE team has been working hard to solve the problem. With the initial versions of Internet Explorer 6 practically all circular references between Javascript and DOM objects caused a memory leak.

It seems than an update to IE6 alleviated this problem somewhat, but there are probably still many users who haven't upgraded, and even the later versions of IE6 and current versions of IE7 still have problems. Most of the problems are caused by closures, which really shouldn't be an issue, as Firefox, Opera and Safari generally handle them fine. I use closures all the time in my code so I shudder to think of what leaks lie beneath. But, I'm about to download this leak detector and give it a try. From the screenshots, it doesn't look too appealing, but I'm curious to find what it will detect on the past few sites I've made.