Force Garbage Collection in AS3?

Question

Is it possible to programmatically force a full garbage collection run in ActionScript 3.0?

Let\'s say I\'ve created a bunch of Display objects with eventListeners a

Answer 1

There is a new API for telling the GC that it might be a "relatively good moment" to collect.

See the Adobe API docs for System.pauseForGCIfCollectionImminent

And also this Adobe blog post from shortly after the method was introduced in Player version 11

The method takes an "imminence" argument; basically, you feed in a low number (near 0.0) if you really want the collector to run, even if there has not been much activity (currently measured by bytes-allocated) since the last collection, and you feed in a large number (near 1.0) if you only want the collection pause to happen if we were already near the point where a collection would happen anyway.

The motivation here is for situations in e.g. games where you want to shift the point where GC's happen by a small amount, e.g. do the GC during a change of level in the game, rather than two seconds after the player started exploring the level.

One very important detail: This new API is supported by both the Release and the Debugger Flash Runtimes. This makes it superior to calling System.gc().