Adobe AIR, memory leaks.

Question

We all know how web browsers (such as Firefox) are certain to fill up memory consumption because we continuously execute JavaScript code (from websites) that is prone to memory leakage.

I am debating in developing a Desktop app, and given my experience with Javascript/Css/HTML, I thought I would give AIR a try, this way I don't have to use Java (for example) and deal with learning all its GUI swing stuff.

The problem is that I worry about memory leakage in AIR, since AIR is simply a web browser with an API layer to interact with the Operating System.

Is it plausible to worry about memory leakage in AIR? What should I do about it?

Answer 1

Sure. I've seen AIR apps on Linux swallow gigabytes of memory over time. It's a real blocker for me and stops me using them.

That said, other people on other platforms have no issue with it. Ultimately you need to decide what most of your market will be using and how affected they'll be by any issues in AIR (or other).

If it's not that important (but it's still an issue) submit bug reports and hope Adobe fix things.

Answer 2

Hi Luca,

My name is Rob Christensen and I am product manager on Adobe AIR. First, let me say that it is quite easy to build a desktop application, regardless of underlying technology, that consumes a large amount of memory and/or does not free up memory.

In the next release of AIR, we are looking at providing some additional capabilities to the AIR runtime to make it easier to identify memory leaks for JavaScript-based applications. Developers that are building Flash or Flex based applications can already take advantage of the memory profiler included in Flex Builder to track this down. We are hoping to do something similar for JavaScript developers as well.

In my experience talking to developers, memory leaks often occur when objects in memory are never cleaned up. For example, imagine a Twitter client that lists tweets from users based around a search keyword. Overtime, more results show and the list becomes longer. If there is not a limit on the maximum number of Tweets visible, memory will, of course, go up over time. Instead, the application should impose a reasonable limit on the number of items that appear in that list.

There are some talks available that describe best practices around handling memory in AIR. Though the examples in this article are mostly written in ActionScript, the same concepts apply to JavaScript as well.

Performance-Tuning AIR applications http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/articles/air_performance.html

If there are memory leaks in the runtime, we jump on these as quickly as we can. We encourage developers to know about such issues by sending them back to our team using the following feedback form (www.adobe.com/go/wish).

If you are using an Ajax framework, you may want to look into whether there are known issues with memory leaks for that particular framework.

So, to summarize, yes, you should always worry about memory when building a desktop application -- whether with AIR or C++. As you are developing your application, you should monitor the memory usage of your application so that you can identify any issues sooner than later. One way to do this is to run longevity tests -- keep your application open over night to see if memory is creeping up.

In general, the tools available for browsers are very limited as well. I expect this will change soon as browser vendors also start providing more hooks into their browsers for identifying memory usage. Hope this helps.

Thank you!

-Rob

Product Manager, Adobe AIR