We have an application that behaves really badly in IE6, the application relies heavily on javascript and most of the activity happens in one page.
In IE6, it seems that memory keeps piling up and never gets cleared even when you navigate to a different site!
Since there's not so little code running within the browser, I'm looking for an external tool that will shed some light on the memory consumption of the application so that we can focus our optimization efforts.
Well, IE6 is fundamentally broken, this shouldn't come as a surprise to any web developer. Is the browser still so widely used among your users that this is a problem?
Anyway, I know IE6 leaks memory whenever you use cyclic references in Javascript. Its garbage collector is too broken to handle these, so they never get freed.
These are good reads:
A tool that has been helpful to me is:
What I do is refresh the javascript-heavy page and see if the memory usage goes up(it shouldn't). If it does, then there's a leak. I then comment out blocks of code until it doesn't leak, and try to narrow it down further.
One of the best tools I've found is IE Sieve, Memory Leak detector for Internet Explorer which is an improved version of drip - http://home.wanadoo.nl/jsrosman/