How to remove DOM elements without memory leaks?

Question

My JavaSript code builds a list of LI elements. When I update the list, memory usage grows and never goes down. I tested in sIEve and it shows that the browser keeps all elements that were supposed to be deleted by $.remove() or $.empty jQuery commands.

What should I do to remove DOM nodes without the memory leak?

See my other question for the specific code.

Answer 1

The DOM preserves all DOM nodes, even if they have been removed from the DOM tree itself, the only way to remove these nodes is to do a page refresh (if you put the list into an iframe the refresh won't be as noticable)

Otherwise, you could wait for the problem to get bad enough that the browsers garbage collector is forced into action (talking hundreds of megabytes of unused nodes here)

Best practice is to reuse nodes.

EDIT: Try this:

var garbageBin;
window.onload = function ()
    {
    if (typeof(garbageBin) === 'undefined')
        {
        //Here we are creating a 'garbage bin' object to temporarily 
        //store elements that are to be discarded
        garbageBin = document.createElement('div');
        garbageBin.style.display = 'none'; //Make sure it is not displayed
        document.body.appendChild(garbageBin);
        }
    function discardElement(element)
        {
        //The way this works is due to the phenomenon whereby child nodes
        //of an object with it's innerHTML emptied are removed from memory

        //Move the element to the garbage bin element
        garbageBin.appendChild(element);
        //Empty the garbage bin
        garbageBin.innerHTML = "";
        }
    }

To use it in your context, you would do it like this:

discardElement(this);