AS3: Too Large to Garbage Collect?

I'm working on a flash game that has developed an obvious memory leak. I do what I'm supposed to do with GC; remove all references to the object, nullify it, remove all listeners (or use weak listeners); but the leak is still present.

I've stumbled across this article: http://www.andymoore.ca/2010/03/motherfucking-as3-garbage-collection/

It claims tha开发者_StackOverflow中文版t objects that are too large will never be garbage collected. This theory fits well with my project since all of my game resides in a couple of huge MovieClips that are created and destroyed often.

Is there any merit to the claim that objects that are too large will never be garbage collected?

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I've worked on multiple mid-size to large-size project and the leak you describe seems to be a problem of recursive disposal. You need to really introspect your object from the most nested item and start disposing from that point (stop, nullify, dispose bitmapdata and remove listeners).

I suggest that you take a look at those: A nice profiler: https://code.google.com/p/flashpreloadprofiler/

Quasimondo developer on the aviary suite experiencing problem with large bitmap and showing an application that simulate memory assignation: http://www.quasimondo.com/archives/000691.php http://www.quasimondo.com/examples/memoryhog.html

Also for more resources on GC issues I suggest you use the Adobe Jira and Bugbase system: https://bugs.adobe.com/

I do not think there are any merit to that claim. Also read Andy Moore comment:

So doing a quick pass of on-death = null codes, I halved my memory footprint. I was able to drop that by a further 80% by commenting out all my “.cacheAsBitmap = true” statements.

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You can try using SWFWire Debugger to see exactly which objects aren't being collected.

Disclaimer: This is my own project