Comments on: Kick starting the garbage collector in Actionscript 3 with AIR

By: Nate Chatellier

Nate Chatellier — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 23:20:05 +0000

Now that AIR 2.0 is out, I’m curious if Adobe has addressed any of these concerns. I know they’ve focused much on CPU usage, but I haven’t heard nearly as much talk about memory usage…

By: PS

PS — Tue, 25 May 2010 07:43:57 +0000

Really nice post. Cleared most of my doubts.

By: DB

DB — Tue, 18 May 2010 21:07:05 +0000

I’ve got a web app that quickly grows to the following size:

Profiler says:
Peak: 57m
Current: 49m

After gc, generally settles back down as it should.

System.totalMemory: 337m

Task Manager shows browser at: 840m

Not sure what I’m going to do. I’m quite sure (well, 99% sure) I don’t have any leaks as I watch the memory go up and down in the profiler as it should, but the browser just keeps going up and up and never comes down.

By: Tom Mason

Tom Mason — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:50:54 +0000

Based on my own experience with AS3 memory management, I also have started pooling my display objects to keep memory usage small and efficient. However, I’ve recently run into a bug in AIR with pooling MovieClips.

If you have a MovieClip with multiple frames representing different states for a model object, and you grab an instance from the pool, set its frame, show it, then put it back in the pool, and repeat, you’ll see that the visual state of the MovieClip does not actually change when gotoAndStop is called. The currentFrame property changes, but the MovieClip gets “stuck” in the same visual state the whole time.

I created a simple test project that exhibits the problem here:

http://www.gabob.com/AirBug.zip

After unzipping, set your workspace in Flex Builder to the flex folder. Then you can run the flash and air versions. The flash version works fine, but the air version only shows green squares, even though the frame is switched to blue sometimes.

By: So you have memory problems in your Flex application? « Flex 4 Examples

So you have memory problems in your Flex application? « Flex 4 Examples — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:58:49 +0000

[...] Sean Christmann: http://www.craftymind.com/2008/04/09/kick-starting-the-garbage-collector-in-actionscript-3-with-air/ [...]

By: Josh Noble

Josh Noble — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 14:06:23 +0000

This was super useful in a recent project I was working on, many thanks for putting this together.

By: theRemix

theRemix — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 20:26:26 +0000

interesting…
i recently found an awesome library that helps with these issues, CASAlib http://casalib.org/ i don’t know if you have ever heard of it, it works wonders!
you just make your CasaSprites and destroy() or removeAndDestroyChildren() recursively and just let the GC do it’s job automagically, you don’t need to force System.gc() unless you want to for debugging and proof.
hth.

By: Sharad Joshi

Sharad Joshi — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 06:21:26 +0000

Great article. Explains a lot of things that I have been facing. Thank you for sharing.

Can you please throw some light on how “Adobe took care of the first problem.. “. Is it available in FP10 or as a patch to FP9?

By: Thoughts & Code

Thoughts & Code — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:22:40 +0000

[...] http://www.craftymind.com/2008/04/09/kick-starting-the-garbage-collector-in-actionscript-3-with-air/ [...]

By: Hadi

Hadi — Sat, 16 May 2009 16:48:50 +0000

nicely said, I really needed this, you save me Thanks a lot.