requestAnimationFrame garbage collection

Question

I\'m profiling the following code\'s memory usage using the Timeline in Chrome Dev Tools v27.

Answer 1

It looks like a retain cycle. Frame is calling itself so holds a retain count and doesn't get released. Also any time you are monitoring running code either with profile, timeline or heap stacks there are going to be some side-effects.

Either way I wouldn't worry about it. There are much larger issues to address if you're trying to get your app or page performant. As long as JS completes in under 16ms, no one will ever notice anything.

The biggest memory/CPU issues are: network calls, decompressing PNGs/JPGs, creating and destroying DOM elements, processing/parsing data on a non-worker thread, poor use of GPU textures and allocating lots of data to cause the GC to take a long time to collect data.

I was able to optimize a scroll list with 1,000,000 items to run at 120FPS on chrome (https://github.com/puppybits/BackboneJS-PerfView). The performance tools should help you find the largest issues that the user can see and you don't need to worry about the minor things.