Memory associated only with non-primitive plots is not garbage collected after empty!(axis)

[adrianboyko]

• what version of Makie are you running? Makie 0.21.9 and GLMakie 0.10.9
• can you reproduce the bug with a fresh environment ? (]activate --temp; add Makie) Yes
• What platform + GPU are you on? Kubuntu 24.04, Wayland, i5-4570, Mesa Intel HD Graphics 4600

The following program consumes all available memory, presumably because the large matrices are not being garbage collected. Note that contour! is used and that if it is changed to heatmap! then garbage collection works as expected and all is fine.

using GLMakie
fig::Figure = Figure()
ax::Makie.Axis = Axis(fig[1,1])
display(fig)
while true
    empty!(ax)
    big_matrix::Matrix{Float64} = zeros(10_000, 10_000)
    big_matrix[1,1] = 1
    contour!(ax, big_matrix)
end

[asinghvi17]

contour in particular has a lot of lift statements that aren't associated with the plot, which is probably what keeps the memory persisting. I think we just need to add those.

[asinghvi17]

@adrianboyko could you see if #4303 fixes your issue? You can try it out by:

]add Makie#as/contour_memory_leak MakieCore#as/contour_memory_leak GLMakie#as/contour_memory_leak

(to clean up, simply ]free Makie MakieCore GLMakie)

[adrianboyko]

That's a fix, sir.