[Browser Client] jQuery memory leak

[jvilk]

Problem

Mailpile's JavaScript UI currently suffers from this jQuery memory leak. The cause is repeated calls to $(document).ready(), which seem to happen every time Mailpipe updates the UI.

The fix should be present in the next jQuery release.

Severity

I wrote a script that performed the following steps in a loop in a single session:

• For the top four messages in the inbox:
  • Click on the message to view it.
  • Click on the inbox to return to the message listing.
• Take a heap snapshot

I then graphed Mailpile's JavaScript heap size over each iteration of that loop:

The leak is noticeable, and may add up over a long session.

Here's a graph of Mailpile's memory usage with the memory leak fixed:

Possible Fixes

• Update to the newest jQuery when it is released
• Manually apply the small patch from the PR
• Avoid calling $(document).ready(function() {}) so often. I am not sure if this behavior is present in Mailpile or one of its dependency.

[BjarniRunar]

Thank you for the excellent bug report. I agree with your first two suggestions; the third is a bit harder since we rely on being able to call $(document).ready(...) from multiple locations as a simple way to keep the code loosely coupled; each fragment can have its own initialization logic without needing to coordinate with the rest of the page.

[BjarniRunar]

I am going to close this; it should get addressed when we update to the latest versions of everything (right before freezing 1.0), which is issue: #1800