Flash Player 9’s Biggest Problem
Grant just recently wrote an excellent article detailing what I believe is Flash Player 9’s biggest problem at the moment. The lack of control that we have over unloading SWF files from memory (and memory management in general for that matter) is a huge deal and is truly causing some big issues with modular development. The PGA Tour app that I have been mentioning lately definitely suffers from this - memory skyrockets and all you can do is patiently wait for the Flash Player garbage collector to eventually clean up the mess. Since there is no guarantee as to when this will happen and the user is constantly clicking things that cause various modules to load and unload, memory is always higher than it needs to be.
So what can you do? As Grant mentioned, the best thing you can do is voice your concerns to the Flash Player team directly using the link below.
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Yeah you really can never tell when the garbage collector is going to clean up the mess. Sometimes a module runs smoothly sometimes it feels like they’re all stacking ontop of eachother.
I just pray for good memory management every day…
Let’s hope they listen to the masses!
Our team ran into this problem and hopefully this issue will be addressed. I’m glad you mentioned this topic. I hope they listen and proceed wisely. In the past we had to build custom deconstruction techniques that reset properties and tried to disconnect references but even then object references lingered and never got cleaned.
Also worth noting is that Adobe just released a public bug tracking system specifically for Flash Player. So make sure and log any other bugs that are driving you nuts as well.
https://bugs.adobe.com/flashplayer/
Thanks for the article, stumbled about a related bug just yesterday.
“SWFLoader plays audio, even though the SWF is unloaded/replaced”
http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/SDK-14379
It was already filed in january, was classified with “C Priority”, deferred and closed.
Unbelievable, really…
kolt, that’s not really reporting the issue at hand. It’s a bug report related to a peripheral problem that is caused by swfs not unloading. It’s not surprising that Adobe QC didn’t mark it as a high priority, because there is a workaround that solves the specific issue being reported.
I’m surprised that after searching the database for the last 15 minutes, I can’t seem to find a report logged specifically for this problem. I may have to put together a bug report of my own this weekend.