Serious Memory Leak in IE9 when accessing NTWS application! SOLVED!!

[Jeffrey Kuijt]

Hi all,

I think this is a serious issue:

When I access an NTWS application (version 4 or 5.39 web app) with IE9 browser and I look at Task Manager (iexplore.exe) you see the memory grow and grow, when you click in the NTWS application.
I tried a Windows 2008 machine with IE9 and when I press the "Home" menu item a lot and I look at the Task Manager, the memory is growing very quickly to 200.000 K and more and more.
I also tried some Windows 7 machines with IE9 and also, the memory in Task Manager of iexplore.exe is growing very quickly.

Can somebody confirm this?
So start IE9.
Browse to your NTWS application.
Look at your Task Manager at iexplore.exe.
Press the "Home" menu item a lot (or navigate in your web application) and you see grow the memory in Task Manager.

In IE8 and Firefox there are NO issues.

I googled and found the following problems of other users when using jQuery with IE9:

http://forums.asp.net/t/1739735.aspx/1
http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-IE/Offtopic/thread/a7d41189-db39-4080-8b21-b01f487e93ac

Bruce, can you confirm this?

Best regards
Jeffrey

[Bruce]

From your evidence it would appear that your subject line might be better written as..;
"Serious Memory Leak in IE9"

In which case - what you you like _me_ to do about it?

Cheers
Bruce

[Jeffrey Kuijt]

From your evidence it would appear that your subject line might be better written as..;
"Serious Memory Leak in IE9"
In which case - what you you like _me_ to do about it?

Hi Bruce,

I have just compiled example 3 (Basic with Login) with NT 5.39.
When I browse with IE9 from different machines to this web application and I monitor Task Manager, the memory of iexplore.exe is growing very quickly.
I can get it over 500000 K within just a couple of minutes!
Just press F5 (refresh) or press the Home menu item and you see with every click, the memory is growing with blocks of 5000-10000K!

At this moment I can only see this memory leak with sites that use jQuery/Ajax.
And NTWS apps make heavily use of jQuery.
Sites without jQuery don't show this memory leak.

So that's why I mentioned this issue.
I was "playing" with my NTWS application and suddenly my IE9 browser went very slow, so when I looked at Task Manager I saw that iexplore.exe was using more than 500000 K!
And after that I tested this with more machines with IE9 and all show the same memory leakage with jQuery sites.

I don't know what _you_ can do about this, but I know that a lot of users use IE9 and it's gonna be a problem when they want to use my web application all day.
Can you confirm this issue at yours with IE9?

Please look at the screenshot where you can see the huge memory usage of iexplore.exe:
http://adsystemsmedia.nl/IE9-jQuery-Memory.png

Best regards
Jeffrey

[Jeffrey Kuijt]

Hi

I just saw these topics at the jQuery Forum:

http://forum.jquery.com/topic/possible-memory-leak-in-remove-and-empty

http://forum.jquery.com/topic/memory-leaks-with-ajax-calls

Best regards
Jeffrey

[Jeffrey Kuijt]

Also found this article:

http://www.smallworkarounds.net/2009/04/jquery-leaking-memory-be-careful-while.html

and

http://spin.atomicobject.com/2010/10/08/jquery-ajax-memory-leak-in-ie8/

Bruce, do you also see this huge memory leak in IE9? Anyone else?

Best regards
Jeffrey

[Bruce]

yep, IE 9 leaks for me too Jeffrey.

cheers
Bruce

[Bruce]

BTW both
http://www.smallworkarounds.net/2009/04/jquery-leaking-memory-be-careful-while.html
http://spin.atomicobject.com/2010/10/08/jquery-ajax-memory-leak-in-ie8/
are very old posts, and at least this one;
http://spin.atomicobject.com/2010/10/08/jquery-ajax-memory-leak-in-ie8/
have long since been sorted out (in jQuery 1.5.2) - we're currently using 1.7.0 and will probably go to 1.7.2 within the next few releases.

I understand there's some concern for your clients using IE - but really there's not a lot I can do about it. For those users who notice a problem I do recommend using a better browser - probably Chrome would be my first suggestion. (People think one browser is basically just like all the others. This is quite simply not true. Some browsers are better than others) Chrome is probably the fastest I've tried. I use Chrome and Firefox all the time, and IE for one very specific task.

As you can tell from your posts IE has a history of leaking memory, and while libraries like jQuery do their best to work around known issues at the end of the day IE is still IE.

Cheers
Bruce

[Jeffrey Kuijt]

Thanks Bruce,

I hope there will be some fix in IE9 like they did in previous IE releases.

Best regards
Jeffrey

[Robert Iliuta]

Hallo Jeffrey,

I use only Chrome, Firefox and Safari, and my data base has restrictions if someone try to access with IE or Opera... Because it's a data base and it's not a web site I have the power to put some restrictions :-) , I told them from the beginning that this data base will work only with Chrome, Firefox and Safari. I told them that I do not offer support for IE or Opera. There are a lot of  options here :-) ... we are not limited to IE or Opera... I never receive a complain regarding this issue... I have more then 200 users and no one complain :-)

I agree with Bruce on his last post.

and don't bother too much with IE...just my opinion )

Regards,
Robert
 

[Jeffrey Kuijt]

Hi,

These days my customers have upgraded (which happens automatically) their IE8 browser to IE9.
A lot of my customers use IE9 as web browser.
They are complaining that IE9 becomes very slow when they have worked/are working with my web app.
When they run task manager, iexplore.exe has used A LOT of memory.
In December 2011 I also saw this issue with the example app, look at:
http://adsystemsmedia.nl/IE9-jQuery-Memory.png

My customers don't like the fact they have to install another browser.
They say they only have these problems with my web apps.

So what are my options?
Bruce, can you contact the jQuery Forum about this to find a solution?
I think this will become more and more an issue as IE9 will be the standard Microsoft browser these days.

Best regards
Jeffrey

[Bruce]

Hi Jeffrey,

>> My customers don't like the fact they have to install another browser.

They are of course free to continue using IE. If they feel the quality of the browser is not up to much then of course they should discuss that with Microsoft. Clearly neither you, nor I, have any control over the code that ships in IE.

The real question of course is to what extent you pander to that group - to what extent do you remove functionality from others so that their choices can be validated.

While there are certainly several memory leaks in IE, the one most likely causing us problems at the moment is reported here;
https://github.com/Modernizr/Modernizr/issues/513

Which build of NetTalk are you currently on?

cheers
Bruce

[Jeffrey Kuijt]

Hi Bruce,

I am still on build 5.39, but will soon convert to version 6.

Best regards
Jeffrey

[Bruce]

For NT 5

look in the modenizr javascript file.
search for
{return!!navigator.geolocation}
replace with
{return 0}
then run gzipall etc.

I'll tweak the next NT6 build along the same lines.

cheers
Bruce

[Jeffrey Kuijt]

Hi Bruce,

This solves the memory leak! 
I have done several tests under IE9 and the memory usage stays very stable with this fix.

You have made my day and my weekend and ... too many things to mention! 

THANKS A LOT!!

Best regards
Jeffrey