Force Garbage Collection in AS3?

apache-flex flash actionscript-3 garbage-collection
defmeta picture defmeta · Oct 10, 2008 · Viewed 33.1k times · Source

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 and some of the DO's have been removed, some of the eventListeners have been triggered and removed etc... Is there a way to force garbage collection to run and collect everything that is available to be collected?

Answer

davr picture davr · Oct 10, 2008

Yes, it's possible, but it is generally a bad idea. The GC should have a better idea of when is a good time to run than you should, and except for a very specific case, like you just used 500MB of memory and you need to get it back ASAP, you shouldn't call the GC yourself.

In Flash 10, there is a System.gc() method you can call (but please don't, see above) - keep in mind System.gc() only works in the debugging version of Flash player 10+.

In Flash 9, there is an unsupported way to force it via an odd LocalConnection command, but it may not work in all versions. See this post by Grant Skinner.

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