Detect When Ie11, With Its Built-in Memory Leak, Runs Out Of Memory (1.5gb Recyclable Pool)

IE11 has a well-documented iframe memory leak. In a SPA, if you are using iframes the memory will grow to about 1.5GB after which time it will slow down until a crash. My task is t

Solution 1:

As far as my experience with this goes, your best bet to mitigate this is to reduce re-creation of iframes and reduce total memory used so the leak is small (for example by code-splitting unused code, removing large libraries, etc). You can then do a test to approximate how much memory you expect to leak per page load (or whatever relevant metric in your case) and come up with a heuristic to reload the app (for example, after 50 page loads).

Keep in mind that sometimes reloading the app will not help IE reclaim memory. There is a weird workaround for this - you can open a new tab, navigate to your app, switch to that tab, and close the old tab. Obviously not an ideal user experience, but it is more reliable than a page refresh.

In other cases memory is leaking because you have a reference to the iframe from somewhere in the main window, or did not clean up event handlers within the iframe before removing it - I assume you have checked for this from the description, but I thought it wouldn't hurt to mention it :).

Solution 2:

This is what I ended up using to detect IE11 running out of memory.

Main idea: Timer every 1 second. If 1 second timer takes 1 minute, we just froze.

var startTime, endTime;

functionstart() {
    startTime = newDate();
};

functionend() {
    endTime = newDate();
    var timeDiff = endTime - startTime; //in ms// strip the ms
    timeDiff /= 1000;

    // get seconds var seconds = Math.round(timeDiff);
    console.log(seconds + " seconds");

    if (seconds > 60)
        console.log("IE11 just froze. We need to refresh.");
}

start();

setInterval(function () {
    end();

    start();
}, 1000);