1. The profiler post on my blog attempts to explain the difference between profiler memory, System.totalMemory and process memory. Profiler memory is the memory attributed to AS properties. The player has lots of other backing objects allocated in System.totalMemory. Fonts and bitmaps have very small AS representations (a couple of slots for properties). They are mostly buffers the player will use to render.
2. It hasn't been proven, but my theory is that some of the memory attributed to XML is due to the string pool growing and not cleaning up properly. I do have confirmation that XML is not fully parsed. Nodes are turned into structures on-demand so the amount of memory used by XML grows as you traverse it. Also keep in mind that the player rarely, if ever, frees up memory pages because they usually end up sparsely populated so System.totalMemory won't always shrink as much as you would think 3. I'd have to see it in context to remember what it means. A method closure is the association of a method with an object. If you see them in the profiler I think they are simply references to methods in a class. 4. UnloadAndStop is not a giant hammer. It simply stops various media streams as well as dereferences the SWF. It does not free up every AS reference to objects in the SWF so it can't just punt a SWF from memory, you still have to clean those references up some other way. A timer that is still on won't GC. An object listening via weak reference will, but I was told recently that weak references don't get GC'd as quickly as other kinds of references. HTH Alex Harui Flex SDK Developer Adobe Systems Inc.<http://www.adobe.com/> Blog: http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jesse Warden Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 6:46 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [flexcoders] Flex Profiler Questions 1. Why doesn't he show assets (bitmaps, fonts, ... the things that take the most RAM)? Profiler reports 6 megs, but System.totalMemory reports 40 megs. No other SWF is open on the system beyond that one (so as not to pollute System.totalMemory accounting for multiple SWF's). 2. I had some XML accounting for 150 megs of 190 megs, yet the profiler didn't show it; said 21 megs. I ran garbage collection multiple times in the profiler, but it still stayed around. Why isn't it picking this massive chunk up? 3. What are "Method Closure"; event listeners? 4. Running code in Flash, I can confirm from both viewing memory via System.totalMemory + having a timer that traces out a message on every tick that a SWF is in fact unloaded from a Loader in Flash Player 10. Running this code in the profiler shows the Loader never unloading (yes, I'm compiling for 10 and yes I'm using unloadAndStop; remember, same code). The profiler claims Loader still has it's instance around and the timer doesn't die with his weak listener... but does running in Flash.
