Garbage collection after removing child nodes

[Tim Streater]

I have a <select> that I build up dynamically. To later clear and
repopulate it, I can't use the standard trick of:

ptr_to_select.options.length = 0;

because sometimes the <select> will contain <optgroup>s. These stay in
the <select> (for Firefox and IE7, not Safari), after setting the length
to zero.

What seems to work on all browsers is:

while (ptr_to_select.childNodes.length>0)
{
ptr_to_select.removeChild (popup.lastChild);
}

but, are the removed children properly garbage collected? Especially as
some will be the <optgroup>s and have children themselves.

 

[Bart Van der Donck]

I have a <select> that I build up dynamically. To later clear and
repopulate it, I can't use the standard trick of:

ptr_to_select.options.length = 0;

because sometimes the <select> will contain <optgroup>s. These stay in
the <select> (for Firefox and IE7, not Safari), after setting the length
to zero.

What seems to work on all browsers is:

while  (ptr_to_select.childNodes.length>0)
     {
     ptr_to_select.removeChild (popup.lastChild);
     }

but, are the removed children properly garbage collected? Especially as
some will be the <optgroup>s and have children themselves.

The only way to know is to test with heavy data, and then see how many
CPU is freed by the browser after the delete-action is finished.

 

[Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn]

[...] are the removed children properly garbage collected? Especially as
some will be the <optgroup>s and have children themselves.

The only way to know is to test with heavy data, and then see how many
CPU is freed by the browser after the delete-action is finished.

Memory (RAM), not CPU.


PointedEars