How is cyclic referencing handled in javascript and browsers? - javascript

I have been exploring patterns in various MV* frameworks out there and today noticed a weird one, which seems to cause some issues
Model prototype. has a property collections: []
Collection prototype. has a property models: []
When a collection gets a new model, it is being pushed into collection.models but the model itself is also decorated to be aware of the collection it is a member of - i.e. the collection instance is pushed into model.collections.
so model.collections[0] is a collection that contains a .models[0] being the model that has a collection property... and so on.
at its most basic:
var A = function() {
this.collections = [];
},
B = function() {
this.models = [];
this.add = function(what) {
what.collections.push(this);
this.models.push(what)
};
};
var model = new A();
var collection = new B();
collection.add(model);
Here's the guilty party in action: https://github.com/lyonbros/composer.js/blob/master/composer.js#L310-313 and then further down it's pushing into models here: https://github.com/lyonbros/composer.js/blob/master/composer.js#L781-784
I suppose there is going to be a degree of lazy evaluation - things won't be used until they are needed. That code - on its own - works.
But I was also writing tests via buster.js and I noticed that all the tests that had reliance on sinon.spy() were producing InternalError: too much recursion (FF) or RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded(Chrome). The captured FF was even crashing unresponsively, which I have never encountered with buster test driver before - it even went to 3.5gb of ram use over my lunch break.
After a fair amount of debugging, I undid the reference storage and suddenly, it was all working fine again. Admittedly, the removal of the spy() assertions also worked but that's not the point.
So, the question is - having code like that, is it acceptable, how will the browsers interpret it, what is the bottleneck and how would you decorate your models with a pointer to the collection they belong in (perhaps a collection controller and collection uids or something).
full gist of the buster.js test that will fail: https://gist.github.com/2960549

The browsers don't care. The issue is that the tool you were using failed to check for cyclic reference chains through the object graph. Those are perfectly legitimate, at least they are if you want them and expect them.
If you think of an object and its properties, and the objects referenced directly or indirectly via those properties, then that assembly makes up a graph. If it's possible to follow references around and wind up back where you started, then that means the graph has a cycle. It's definitely a good thing that the language allows cycles. Whether it's appropriate in a given system is up to the relevant code.
Thus, for example, a recursive function that traverses an object graph without checking to see if it's already visited an object will definitely trigger a "too much recursion" error if the graph is cyclic.

There will only be two objects referencing each other (called "circular reference").
var a, b = {a: a={b: b}};
// a.b: pointer to b
// b.a: pointer to a
There is no recursion at all. If you are getting too much recursion or Maximum call stack size exceeded errors, there needs to be a function which is invoked too often. This could e.g. happen when you try to clone the objects and recurse over the properties without caring for circular references. You'll need to look further in your code, also the error messages should include a (very long) call stack.

Related

Is it necessary to nullify primitive values for grabage collection?

If I have the following code:
function MyClass() {
this.data = {
// lots of data
};
}
var myClassInstace = new MyClass();
var myobj = {
num:123,
str:"hello",
theClass:myClassInstance
};
I know it's absolutely necessary to do:
myobj.theClass = null;
To free up myClassInstance and its data property for GC. However, what should I do with myobj.num and myobj.str? Do I have to give them a value of null too? Does the fact that they're primitive change anything regarding GC?
The JavaScript runtime that implements garbage collection will be able to collect items as soon as values are no longer reachable from code. This is true for object references as well as primitives. The details of the exact moment the item is collected varies by implementation, but it is not even necessary to set your object references to null (as you state) unless you need the object cleaned up sooner than the natural termination of the current function.
This all ties into the fundamental concept of "scope" and the Scope Chain. When an item is no longer in any other objects scope chain it can be collected. Understanding this clearly will answer this question and also help to understand closures, which are scenarios where items stay in memory longer than you might have expected.
There are a lot of "it depends here", ranging from what your code is doing to what browser you're running in. However, if your object is JIT compiled to not use a map for its attributes, then the number should be an 8 byte double stored inline inside the object. Nulling it will do nothing.
The string and the myclass instance will be a pointer to memory allocated outside the object (since a string can be arbitarily many bytes, it can't be stored inside the object. A compiler could conceivably store one instance of the string in memory and never free it, however). Nulling them can allow the garbage collector to free them before the main object goes out of scope.
However, the real question is why you're worried about this. Unless you have profiled your code and identified garbage collection or memory leaks as a problem, you should not be trying to optimize GC behavior. In particular, unless your myobj object is itself going to be live for a long time, you should not worry about nulling fields. The GC will collect it when it goes out of scope.
setting to undefined (not null) will work however delete is better example delete myobj.theClass
Just to avoid misunderstanding I will say that there is no way to really delete an object from memory in JavaScript. you delete it's references or set them to undefined so that the GC can do it's work and really delete.

ES6 object dies [duplicate]

I know ECMAScript 6 has constructors but is there such a thing as destructors for ECMAScript 6?
For example if I register some of my object's methods as event listeners in the constructor, I want to remove them when my object is deleted.
One solution is to have a convention of creating a destructor method for every class that needs this kind of behaviour and manually call it. This will remove the references to the event handlers, hence my object will truly be ready for garbage collection. Otherwise it'll stay in memory because of those methods.
But I was hoping if ECMAScript 6 has something native that will be called right before the object is garbage collected.
If there is no such mechanism, what is a pattern/convention for such problems?
Is there such a thing as destructors for ECMAScript 6?
No. EcmaScript 6 does not specify any garbage collection semantics at all[1], so there is nothing like a "destruction" either.
If I register some of my object's methods as event listeners in the constructor, I want to remove them when my object is deleted
A destructor wouldn't even help you here. It's the event listeners themselves that still reference your object, so it would not be able to get garbage-collected before they are unregistered.
What you are actually looking for is a method of registering listeners without marking them as live root objects. (Ask your local eventsource manufacturer for such a feature).
1): Well, there is a beginning with the specification of WeakMap and WeakSet objects. However, true weak references are still in the pipeline [1][2].
I just came across this question in a search about destructors and I thought there was an unanswered part of your question in your comments, so I thought I would address that.
thank you guys. But what would be a good convention if ECMAScript
doesn't have destructors? Should I create a method called destructor
and call it manually when I'm done with the object? Any other idea?
If you want to tell your object that you are now done with it and it should specifically release any event listeners it has, then you can just create an ordinary method for doing that. You can call the method something like release() or deregister() or unhook() or anything of that ilk. The idea is that you're telling the object to disconnect itself from anything else it is hooked up to (deregister event listeners, clear external object references, etc...). You will have to call it manually at the appropriate time.
If, at the same time you also make sure there are no other references to that object, then your object will become eligible for garbage collection at that point.
ES6 does have weakMap and weakSet which are ways of keeping track of a set of objects that are still alive without affecting when they can be garbage collected, but it does not provide any sort of notification when they are garbage collected. They just disappear from the weakMap or weakSet at some point (when they are GCed).
FYI, the issue with this type of destructor you ask for (and probably why there isn't much of a call for it) is that because of garbage collection, an item is not eligible for garbage collection when it has an open event handler against a live object so even if there was such a destructor, it would never get called in your circumstance until you actually removed the event listeners. And, once you've removed the event listeners, there's no need for the destructor for this purpose.
I suppose there's a possible weakListener() that would not prevent garbage collection, but such a thing does not exist either.
FYI, here's another relevant question Why is the object destructor paradigm in garbage collected languages pervasively absent?. This discussion covers finalizer, destructor and disposer design patterns. I found it useful to see the distinction between the three.
Edit in 2020 - proposal for object finalizer
There is a Stage 3 EMCAScript proposal to add a user-defined finalizer function after an object is garbage collected.
A canonical example of something that would benefit from a feature like this is an object that contains a handle to an open file. If the object is garbage collected (because no other code still has a reference to it), then this finalizer scheme allows one to at least put a message to the console that an external resource has just been leaked and code elsewhere should be fixed to prevent this leak.
If you read the proposal thoroughly, you will see that it's nothing like a full-blown destructor in a language like C++. This finalizer is called after the object has already been destroyed and you have to predetermine what part of the instance data needs to be passed to the finalizer for it to do its work. Further, this feature is not meant to be relied upon for normal operation, but rather as a debugging aid and as a backstop against certain types of bugs. You can read the full explanation for these limitations in the proposal.
You have to manually "destruct" objects in JS. Creating a destroy function is common in JS. In other languages this might be called free, release, dispose, close, etc. In my experience though it tends to be destroy which will unhook internal references, events and possibly propagates destroy calls to child objects as well.
WeakMaps are largely useless as they cannot be iterated and this probably wont be available until ECMA 7 if at all. All WeakMaps let you do is have invisible properties detached from the object itself except for lookup by the object reference and GC so that they don't disturb it. This can be useful for caching, extending and dealing with plurality but it doesn't really help with memory management for observables and observers. WeakSet is a subset of WeakMap (like a WeakMap with a default value of boolean true).
There are various arguments on whether to use various implementations of weak references for this or destructors. Both have potential problems and destructors are more limited.
Destructors are actually potentially useless for observers/listeners as well because typically the listener will hold references to the observer either directly or indirectly. A destructor only really works in a proxy fashion without weak references. If your Observer is really just a proxy taking something else's Listeners and putting them on an observable then it can do something there but this sort of thing is rarely useful. Destructors are more for IO related things or doing things outside of the scope of containment (IE, linking up two instances that it created).
The specific case that I started looking into this for is because I have class A instance that takes class B in the constructor, then creates class C instance which listens to B. I always keep the B instance around somewhere high above. A I sometimes throw away, create new ones, create many, etc. In this situation a Destructor would actually work for me but with a nasty side effect that in the parent if I passed the C instance around but removed all A references then the C and B binding would be broken (C has the ground removed from beneath it).
In JS having no automatic solution is painful but I don't think it's easily solvable. Consider these classes (pseudo):
function Filter(stream) {
stream.on('data', function() {
this.emit('data', data.toString().replace('somenoise', '')); // Pretend chunks/multibyte are not a problem.
});
}
Filter.prototype.__proto__ = EventEmitter.prototype;
function View(df, stream) {
df.on('data', function(data) {
stream.write(data.toUpper()); // Shout.
});
}
On a side note, it's hard to make things work without anonymous/unique functions which will be covered later.
In a normal case instantiation would be as so (pseudo):
var df = new Filter(stdin),
v1 = new View(df, stdout),
v2 = new View(df, stderr);
To GC these normally you would set them to null but it wont work because they've created a tree with stdin at the root. This is basically what event systems do. You give a parent to a child, the child adds itself to the parent and then may or may not maintain a reference to the parent. A tree is a simple example but in reality you may also find yourself with complex graphs albeit rarely.
In this case, Filter adds a reference to itself to stdin in the form of an anonymous function which indirectly references Filter by scope. Scope references are something to be aware of and that can be quite complex. A powerful GC can do some interesting things to carve away at items in scope variables but that's another topic. What is critical to understand is that when you create an anonymous function and add it to something as a listener to ab observable, the observable will maintain a reference to the function and anything the function references in the scopes above it (that it was defined in) will also be maintained. The views do the same but after the execution of their constructors the children do not maintain a reference to their parents.
If I set any or all of the vars declared above to null it isn't going to make a difference to anything (similarly when it finished that "main" scope). They will still be active and pipe data from stdin to stdout and stderr.
If I set them all to null it would be impossible to have them removed or GCed without clearing out the events on stdin or setting stdin to null (assuming it can be freed like this). You basically have a memory leak that way with in effect orphaned objects if the rest of the code needs stdin and has other important events on it prohibiting you from doing the aforementioned.
To get rid of df, v1 and v2 I need to call a destroy method on each of them. In terms of implementation this means that both the Filter and View methods need to keep the reference to the anonymous listener function they create as well as the observable and pass that to removeListener.
On a side note, alternatively you can have an obserable that returns an index to keep track of listeners so that you can add prototyped functions which at least to my understanding should be much better on performance and memory. You still have to keep track of the returned identifier though and pass your object to ensure that the listener is bound to it when called.
A destroy function adds several pains. First is that I would have to call it and free the reference:
df.destroy();
v1.destroy();
v2.destroy();
df = v1 = v2 = null;
This is a minor annoyance as it's a bit more code but that is not the real problem. When I hand these references around to many objects. In this case when exactly do you call destroy? You cannot simply hand these off to other objects. You'll end up with chains of destroys and manual implementation of tracking either through program flow or some other means. You can't fire and forget.
An example of this kind of problem is if I decide that View will also call destroy on df when it is destroyed. If v2 is still around destroying df will break it so destroy cannot simply be relayed to df. Instead when v1 takes df to use it, it would need to then tell df it is used which would raise some counter or similar to df. df's destroy function would decrease than counter and only actually destroy if it is 0. This sort of thing adds a lot of complexity and adds a lot that can go wrong the most obvious of which is destroying something while there is still a reference around somewhere that will be used and circular references (at this point it's no longer a case of managing a counter but a map of referencing objects). When you're thinking of implementing your own reference counters, MM and so on in JS then it's probably deficient.
If WeakSets were iterable, this could be used:
function Observable() {
this.events = {open: new WeakSet(), close: new WeakSet()};
}
Observable.prototype.on = function(type, f) {
this.events[type].add(f);
};
Observable.prototype.emit = function(type, ...args) {
this.events[type].forEach(f => f(...args));
};
Observable.prototype.off = function(type, f) {
this.events[type].delete(f);
};
In this case the owning class must also keep a token reference to f otherwise it will go poof.
If Observable were used instead of EventListener then memory management would be automatic in regards to the event listeners.
Instead of calling destroy on each object this would be enough to fully remove them:
df = v1 = v2 = null;
If you didn't set df to null it would still exist but v1 and v2 would automatically be unhooked.
There are two problems with this approach however.
Problem one is that it adds a new complexity. Sometimes people do not actually want this behaviour. I could create a very large chain of objects linked to each other by events rather than containment (references in constructor scopes or object properties). Eventually a tree and I would only have to pass around the root and worry about that. Freeing the root would conveniently free the entire thing. Both behaviours depending on coding style, etc are useful and when creating reusable objects it's going to be hard to either know what people want, what they have done, what you have done and a pain to work around what has been done. If I use Observable instead of EventListener then either df will need to reference v1 and v2 or I'll have to pass them all if I want to transfer ownership of the reference to something else out of scope. A weak reference like thing would mitigate the problem a little by transferring control from Observable to an observer but would not solve it entirely (and needs check on every emit or event on itself). This problem can be fixed I suppose if the behaviour only applies to isolated graphs which would complicate the GC severely and would not apply to cases where there are references outside the graph that are in practice noops (only consume CPU cycles, no changes made).
Problem two is that either it is unpredictable in certain cases or forces the JS engine to traverse the GC graph for those objects on demand which can have a horrific performance impact (although if it is clever it can avoid doing it per member by doing it per WeakMap loop instead). The GC may never run if memory usage does not reach a certain threshold and the object with its events wont be removed. If I set v1 to null it may still relay to stdout forever. Even if it does get GCed this will be arbitrary, it may continue to relay to stdout for any amount of time (1 lines, 10 lines, 2.5 lines, etc).
The reason WeakMap gets away with not caring about the GC when non-iterable is that to access an object you have to have a reference to it anyway so either it hasn't been GCed or hasn't been added to the map.
I am not sure what I think about this kind of thing. You're sort of breaking memory management to fix it with the iterable WeakMap approach. Problem two can also exist for destructors as well.
All of this invokes several levels of hell so I would suggest to try to work around it with good program design, good practices, avoiding certain things, etc. It can be frustrating in JS however because of how flexible it is in certain aspects and because it is more naturally asynchronous and event based with heavy inversion of control.
There is one other solution that is fairly elegant but again still has some potentially serious hangups. If you have a class that extends an observable class you can override the event functions. Add your events to other observables only when events are added to yourself. When all events are removed from you then remove your events from children. You can also make a class to extend your observable class to do this for you. Such a class could provide hooks for empty and non-empty so in a since you would be Observing yourself. This approach isn't bad but also has hangups. There is a complexity increase as well as performance decrease. You'll have to keep a reference to object you observe. Critically, it also will not work for leaves but at least the intermediates will self destruct if you destroy the leaf. It's like chaining destroy but hidden behind calls that you already have to chain. A large performance problem is with this however is that you may have to reinitialise internal data from the Observable everytime your class becomes active. If this process takes a very long time then you might be in trouble.
If you could iterate WeakMap then you could perhaps combine things (switch to Weak when no events, Strong when events) but all that is really doing is putting the performance problem on someone else.
There are also immediate annoyances with iterable WeakMap when it comes to behaviour. I mentioned briefly before about functions having scope references and carving. If I instantiate a child that in the constructor that hooks the listener 'console.log(param)' to parent and fails to persist the parent then when I remove all references to the child it could be freed entirely as the anonymous function added to the parent references nothing from within the child. This leaves the question of what to do about parent.weakmap.add(child, (param) => console.log(param)). To my knowledge the key is weak but not the value so weakmap.add(object, object) is persistent. This is something I need to reevaluate though. To me that looks like a memory leak if I dispose all other object references but I suspect in reality it manages that basically by seeing it as a circular reference. Either the anonymous function maintains an implicit reference to objects resulting from parent scopes for consistency wasting a lot of memory or you have behaviour varying based on circumstances which is hard to predict or manage. I think the former is actually impossible. In the latter case if I have a method on a class that simply takes an object and adds console.log it would be freed when I clear the references to the class even if I returned the function and maintained a reference. To be fair this particular scenario is rarely needed legitimately but eventually someone will find an angle and will be asking for a HalfWeakMap which is iterable (free on key and value refs released) but that is unpredictable as well (obj = null magically ending IO, f = null magically ending IO, both doable at incredible distances).
If there is no such mechanism, what is a pattern/convention for such problems?
The term 'cleanup' might be more appropriate, but will use 'destructor' to match OP
Suppose you write some javascript entirely with 'function's and 'var's.
Then you can use the pattern of writing all the functions code within the framework of a try/catch/finally lattice. Within finally perform the destruction code.
Instead of the C++ style of writing object classes with unspecified lifetimes, and then specifying the lifetime by arbitrary scopes and the implicit call to ~() at scope end (~() is destructor in C++), in this javascript pattern the object is the function, the scope is exactly the function scope, and the destructor is the finally block.
If you are now thinking this pattern is inherently flawed because try/catch/finally doesn't encompass asynchronous execution which is essential to javascript, then you are correct. Fortunately, since 2018 the asynchronous programming helper object Promise has had a prototype function finally added to the already existing resolve and catch prototype functions. That means that that asynchronous scopes requiring destructors can be written with a Promise object, using finally as the destructor. Furthermore you can use try/catch/finally in an async function calling Promises with or without await, but must be aware that Promises called without await will be execute asynchronously outside the scope and so handle the desctructor code in a final then.
In the following code PromiseA and PromiseB are some legacy API level promises which don't have finally function arguments specified. PromiseC DOES have a finally argument defined.
async function afunc(a,b){
try {
function resolveB(r){ ... }
function catchB(e){ ... }
function cleanupB(){ ... }
function resolveC(r){ ... }
function catchC(e){ ... }
function cleanupC(){ ... }
...
// PromiseA preced by await sp will finish before finally block.
// If no rush then safe to handle PromiseA cleanup in finally block
var x = await PromiseA(a);
// PromiseB,PromiseC not preceded by await - will execute asynchronously
// so might finish after finally block so we must provide
// explicit cleanup (if necessary)
PromiseB(b).then(resolveB,catchB).then(cleanupB,cleanupB);
PromiseC(c).then(resolveC,catchC,cleanupC);
}
catch(e) { ... }
finally { /* scope destructor/cleanup code here */ }
}
I am not advocating that every object in javascript be written as a function. Instead, consider the case where you have a scope identified which really 'wants' a destructor to be called at its end of life. Formulate that scope as a function object, using the pattern's finally block (or finally function in the case of an asynchronous scope) as the destructor. It is quite like likely that formulating that functional object obviated the need for a non-function class which would otherwise have been written - no extra code was required, aligning scope and class might even be cleaner.
Note: As others have written, we should not confuse destructors and garbage collection. As it happens C++ destructors are often or mainly concerned with manual garbage collection, but not exclusively so. Javascript has no need for manual garbage collection, but asynchronous scope end-of-life is often a place for (de)registering event listeners, etc..
Here you go. The Subscribe/Publish object will unsubscribe a callback function automatically if it goes out of scope and gets garbage collected.
const createWeakPublisher = () => {
const weakSet = new WeakSet();
const subscriptions = new Set();
return {
subscribe(callback) {
if (!weakSet.has(callback)) {
weakSet.add(callback);
subscriptions.add(new WeakRef(callback));
}
return callback;
},
publish() {
for (const weakRef of subscriptions) {
const callback = weakRef.deref();
console.log(callback?.toString());
if (callback) callback();
else subscriptions.delete(weakRef);
}
},
};
};
Although it might not happen immediately after the callback function goes out of scope, or it might not happen at all. See weakRef documentation for more details. But it works like a charm for my use case.
You might also want to check out the FinalizationRegistry API for a different approach.
"A destructor wouldn't even help you here. It's the event listeners
themselves that still reference your object, so it would not be able
to get garbage-collected before they are unregistered."
Not so. The purpose of a destructor is to allow the item that registered the listeners to unregister them. Once an object has no other references to it, it will be garbage collected.
For instance, in AngularJS, when a controller is destroyed, it can listen for a destroy event and respond to it. This isn't the same as having a destructor automatically called, but it's close, and gives us the opportunity to remove listeners that were set when the controller was initialized.
// Set event listeners, hanging onto the returned listener removal functions
function initialize() {
$scope.listenerCleanup = [];
$scope.listenerCleanup.push( $scope.$on( EVENTS.DESTROY, instance.onDestroy) );
$scope.listenerCleanup.push( $scope.$on( AUTH_SERVICE_RESPONSES.CREATE_USER.SUCCESS, instance.onCreateUserResponse ) );
$scope.listenerCleanup.push( $scope.$on( AUTH_SERVICE_RESPONSES.CREATE_USER.FAILURE, instance.onCreateUserResponse ) );
}
// Remove event listeners when the controller is destroyed
function onDestroy(){
$scope.listenerCleanup.forEach( remove => remove() );
}
Javascript does not have destructures the same way C++ does. Instead, alternative design patterns should be used to manage resources. Here are a couple of examples:
You can restrict users to using the instance for the duration of a callback, after which it'll automatically be cleaned up. (This pattern is similar to the beloved "with" statement in Python)
connectToDatabase(async db => {
const resource = await db.doSomeRequest()
await useResource(resource)
}) // The db connection is closed once the callback ends
When the above example is too restrictive, another alternative is to just create explicit cleanup functions.
const db = makeDatabaseConnection()
const resource = await db.doSomeRequest()
updatePageWithResource(resource)
pageChangeEvent.addListener(() => {
db.destroy()
})
The other answers already explained in detail that there is no destructor. But your actual goal seems to be event related. You have an object which is connected to some event and you want this connection to go away automatically when the object is garbage collected. But this won't happen because the event subscription itself references the listener function. Well, UNLESS you use this nifty new WeakRef stuff.
Here is an example:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>
<button onclick="subscribe()">Subscribe</button>
<button id="emitter">Emit</button>
<button onclick="free()">Free</button>
<script>
const emitter = document.getElementById("emitter");
let listener = null;
function addWeakEventListener(element, event, callback) {
// Weakrefs only can store objects, so we put the callback into an object
const weakRef = new WeakRef({ callback });
const listener = () => {
const obj = weakRef.deref();
if (obj == null) {
console.log("Removing garbage collected event listener");
element.removeEventListener(event, listener);
} else {
obj.callback();
}
};
element.addEventListener(event, listener);
}
function subscribe() {
listener = () => console.log("Event fired!");
addWeakEventListener(emitter, "click", listener);
console.log("Listener created and subscribed to emitter");
}
function free() {
listener = null;
console.log("Reference cleared. Now force garbage collection in dev console or wait some time before clicking Emit again.");
}
</script>
</body>
</html>
(JSFiddle)
Clicking the Subscribe button creates a new listener function and registers it at the click event of the Emit button. So clicking the Emit button after that prints a message to the console. Now click the Free button which simply sets the listener variable to null so the garbage collector can remove the listener. Wait some time or force gargabe collection in the developer console and then click the Emit button again. The wrapper listener function now sees that the actual listener (wrapped in a WeakRef) is no longer there and then unsubscribes itself from the button.
WeakRefs are quite powerful but note that there is no guarantee if and when your stuff is garbage collected.
The answer to the question as-stated in the title is FinalizationRegistry, available since Firefox 79 (June 2020), Chrome 84 and derivatives (July 2020), Safari 14.1 (April 2021), and Node 14.6.0 (July 2020)… however, a native JS destructor is probably not the right solution for your use-case.
function create_eval_worker(f) {
let src_worker_blob = new Blob([f.toString()], {type: 'application/javascript'});
let src_worker_url = URL.createObjectURL(src_worker_blob);
async function g() {
let w = new Worker(src_worker_url);
…
}
// Run URL.revokeObjectURL(src_worker_url) as a destructor of g
let registry = new FinalizationRegistry(u => URL.revokeObjectURL(u));
registry.register(g, src_worker_url);
return g;
}
}
Caveat:
Avoid where possible
Correct use of FinalizationRegistry takes careful thought, and it's best avoided if possible. When, how, and whether garbage collection occurs is down to the implementation of any given JavaScript engine. Any behavior you observe in one engine may be different in another engine, in another version of the same engine, or even in a slightly different situation with the same version of the same engine.
…
Developers shouldn't rely on cleanup callbacks for essential program logic. Cleanup callbacks may be useful for reducing memory usage across the course of a program, but are unlikely to be useful otherwise.
A conforming JavaScript implementation, even one that does garbage collection, is not required to call cleanup callbacks. When and whether it does so is entirely down to the implementation of the JavaScript engine. When a registered object is reclaimed, any cleanup callbacks for it may be called then, or some time later, or not at all.
–Mozilla Developer Network

ECMAScript 6 class destructor

I know ECMAScript 6 has constructors but is there such a thing as destructors for ECMAScript 6?
For example if I register some of my object's methods as event listeners in the constructor, I want to remove them when my object is deleted.
One solution is to have a convention of creating a destructor method for every class that needs this kind of behaviour and manually call it. This will remove the references to the event handlers, hence my object will truly be ready for garbage collection. Otherwise it'll stay in memory because of those methods.
But I was hoping if ECMAScript 6 has something native that will be called right before the object is garbage collected.
If there is no such mechanism, what is a pattern/convention for such problems?
Is there such a thing as destructors for ECMAScript 6?
No. EcmaScript 6 does not specify any garbage collection semantics at all[1], so there is nothing like a "destruction" either.
If I register some of my object's methods as event listeners in the constructor, I want to remove them when my object is deleted
A destructor wouldn't even help you here. It's the event listeners themselves that still reference your object, so it would not be able to get garbage-collected before they are unregistered.
What you are actually looking for is a method of registering listeners without marking them as live root objects. (Ask your local eventsource manufacturer for such a feature).
1): Well, there is a beginning with the specification of WeakMap and WeakSet objects. However, true weak references are still in the pipeline [1][2].
I just came across this question in a search about destructors and I thought there was an unanswered part of your question in your comments, so I thought I would address that.
thank you guys. But what would be a good convention if ECMAScript
doesn't have destructors? Should I create a method called destructor
and call it manually when I'm done with the object? Any other idea?
If you want to tell your object that you are now done with it and it should specifically release any event listeners it has, then you can just create an ordinary method for doing that. You can call the method something like release() or deregister() or unhook() or anything of that ilk. The idea is that you're telling the object to disconnect itself from anything else it is hooked up to (deregister event listeners, clear external object references, etc...). You will have to call it manually at the appropriate time.
If, at the same time you also make sure there are no other references to that object, then your object will become eligible for garbage collection at that point.
ES6 does have weakMap and weakSet which are ways of keeping track of a set of objects that are still alive without affecting when they can be garbage collected, but it does not provide any sort of notification when they are garbage collected. They just disappear from the weakMap or weakSet at some point (when they are GCed).
FYI, the issue with this type of destructor you ask for (and probably why there isn't much of a call for it) is that because of garbage collection, an item is not eligible for garbage collection when it has an open event handler against a live object so even if there was such a destructor, it would never get called in your circumstance until you actually removed the event listeners. And, once you've removed the event listeners, there's no need for the destructor for this purpose.
I suppose there's a possible weakListener() that would not prevent garbage collection, but such a thing does not exist either.
FYI, here's another relevant question Why is the object destructor paradigm in garbage collected languages pervasively absent?. This discussion covers finalizer, destructor and disposer design patterns. I found it useful to see the distinction between the three.
Edit in 2020 - proposal for object finalizer
There is a Stage 3 EMCAScript proposal to add a user-defined finalizer function after an object is garbage collected.
A canonical example of something that would benefit from a feature like this is an object that contains a handle to an open file. If the object is garbage collected (because no other code still has a reference to it), then this finalizer scheme allows one to at least put a message to the console that an external resource has just been leaked and code elsewhere should be fixed to prevent this leak.
If you read the proposal thoroughly, you will see that it's nothing like a full-blown destructor in a language like C++. This finalizer is called after the object has already been destroyed and you have to predetermine what part of the instance data needs to be passed to the finalizer for it to do its work. Further, this feature is not meant to be relied upon for normal operation, but rather as a debugging aid and as a backstop against certain types of bugs. You can read the full explanation for these limitations in the proposal.
You have to manually "destruct" objects in JS. Creating a destroy function is common in JS. In other languages this might be called free, release, dispose, close, etc. In my experience though it tends to be destroy which will unhook internal references, events and possibly propagates destroy calls to child objects as well.
WeakMaps are largely useless as they cannot be iterated and this probably wont be available until ECMA 7 if at all. All WeakMaps let you do is have invisible properties detached from the object itself except for lookup by the object reference and GC so that they don't disturb it. This can be useful for caching, extending and dealing with plurality but it doesn't really help with memory management for observables and observers. WeakSet is a subset of WeakMap (like a WeakMap with a default value of boolean true).
There are various arguments on whether to use various implementations of weak references for this or destructors. Both have potential problems and destructors are more limited.
Destructors are actually potentially useless for observers/listeners as well because typically the listener will hold references to the observer either directly or indirectly. A destructor only really works in a proxy fashion without weak references. If your Observer is really just a proxy taking something else's Listeners and putting them on an observable then it can do something there but this sort of thing is rarely useful. Destructors are more for IO related things or doing things outside of the scope of containment (IE, linking up two instances that it created).
The specific case that I started looking into this for is because I have class A instance that takes class B in the constructor, then creates class C instance which listens to B. I always keep the B instance around somewhere high above. A I sometimes throw away, create new ones, create many, etc. In this situation a Destructor would actually work for me but with a nasty side effect that in the parent if I passed the C instance around but removed all A references then the C and B binding would be broken (C has the ground removed from beneath it).
In JS having no automatic solution is painful but I don't think it's easily solvable. Consider these classes (pseudo):
function Filter(stream) {
stream.on('data', function() {
this.emit('data', data.toString().replace('somenoise', '')); // Pretend chunks/multibyte are not a problem.
});
}
Filter.prototype.__proto__ = EventEmitter.prototype;
function View(df, stream) {
df.on('data', function(data) {
stream.write(data.toUpper()); // Shout.
});
}
On a side note, it's hard to make things work without anonymous/unique functions which will be covered later.
In a normal case instantiation would be as so (pseudo):
var df = new Filter(stdin),
v1 = new View(df, stdout),
v2 = new View(df, stderr);
To GC these normally you would set them to null but it wont work because they've created a tree with stdin at the root. This is basically what event systems do. You give a parent to a child, the child adds itself to the parent and then may or may not maintain a reference to the parent. A tree is a simple example but in reality you may also find yourself with complex graphs albeit rarely.
In this case, Filter adds a reference to itself to stdin in the form of an anonymous function which indirectly references Filter by scope. Scope references are something to be aware of and that can be quite complex. A powerful GC can do some interesting things to carve away at items in scope variables but that's another topic. What is critical to understand is that when you create an anonymous function and add it to something as a listener to ab observable, the observable will maintain a reference to the function and anything the function references in the scopes above it (that it was defined in) will also be maintained. The views do the same but after the execution of their constructors the children do not maintain a reference to their parents.
If I set any or all of the vars declared above to null it isn't going to make a difference to anything (similarly when it finished that "main" scope). They will still be active and pipe data from stdin to stdout and stderr.
If I set them all to null it would be impossible to have them removed or GCed without clearing out the events on stdin or setting stdin to null (assuming it can be freed like this). You basically have a memory leak that way with in effect orphaned objects if the rest of the code needs stdin and has other important events on it prohibiting you from doing the aforementioned.
To get rid of df, v1 and v2 I need to call a destroy method on each of them. In terms of implementation this means that both the Filter and View methods need to keep the reference to the anonymous listener function they create as well as the observable and pass that to removeListener.
On a side note, alternatively you can have an obserable that returns an index to keep track of listeners so that you can add prototyped functions which at least to my understanding should be much better on performance and memory. You still have to keep track of the returned identifier though and pass your object to ensure that the listener is bound to it when called.
A destroy function adds several pains. First is that I would have to call it and free the reference:
df.destroy();
v1.destroy();
v2.destroy();
df = v1 = v2 = null;
This is a minor annoyance as it's a bit more code but that is not the real problem. When I hand these references around to many objects. In this case when exactly do you call destroy? You cannot simply hand these off to other objects. You'll end up with chains of destroys and manual implementation of tracking either through program flow or some other means. You can't fire and forget.
An example of this kind of problem is if I decide that View will also call destroy on df when it is destroyed. If v2 is still around destroying df will break it so destroy cannot simply be relayed to df. Instead when v1 takes df to use it, it would need to then tell df it is used which would raise some counter or similar to df. df's destroy function would decrease than counter and only actually destroy if it is 0. This sort of thing adds a lot of complexity and adds a lot that can go wrong the most obvious of which is destroying something while there is still a reference around somewhere that will be used and circular references (at this point it's no longer a case of managing a counter but a map of referencing objects). When you're thinking of implementing your own reference counters, MM and so on in JS then it's probably deficient.
If WeakSets were iterable, this could be used:
function Observable() {
this.events = {open: new WeakSet(), close: new WeakSet()};
}
Observable.prototype.on = function(type, f) {
this.events[type].add(f);
};
Observable.prototype.emit = function(type, ...args) {
this.events[type].forEach(f => f(...args));
};
Observable.prototype.off = function(type, f) {
this.events[type].delete(f);
};
In this case the owning class must also keep a token reference to f otherwise it will go poof.
If Observable were used instead of EventListener then memory management would be automatic in regards to the event listeners.
Instead of calling destroy on each object this would be enough to fully remove them:
df = v1 = v2 = null;
If you didn't set df to null it would still exist but v1 and v2 would automatically be unhooked.
There are two problems with this approach however.
Problem one is that it adds a new complexity. Sometimes people do not actually want this behaviour. I could create a very large chain of objects linked to each other by events rather than containment (references in constructor scopes or object properties). Eventually a tree and I would only have to pass around the root and worry about that. Freeing the root would conveniently free the entire thing. Both behaviours depending on coding style, etc are useful and when creating reusable objects it's going to be hard to either know what people want, what they have done, what you have done and a pain to work around what has been done. If I use Observable instead of EventListener then either df will need to reference v1 and v2 or I'll have to pass them all if I want to transfer ownership of the reference to something else out of scope. A weak reference like thing would mitigate the problem a little by transferring control from Observable to an observer but would not solve it entirely (and needs check on every emit or event on itself). This problem can be fixed I suppose if the behaviour only applies to isolated graphs which would complicate the GC severely and would not apply to cases where there are references outside the graph that are in practice noops (only consume CPU cycles, no changes made).
Problem two is that either it is unpredictable in certain cases or forces the JS engine to traverse the GC graph for those objects on demand which can have a horrific performance impact (although if it is clever it can avoid doing it per member by doing it per WeakMap loop instead). The GC may never run if memory usage does not reach a certain threshold and the object with its events wont be removed. If I set v1 to null it may still relay to stdout forever. Even if it does get GCed this will be arbitrary, it may continue to relay to stdout for any amount of time (1 lines, 10 lines, 2.5 lines, etc).
The reason WeakMap gets away with not caring about the GC when non-iterable is that to access an object you have to have a reference to it anyway so either it hasn't been GCed or hasn't been added to the map.
I am not sure what I think about this kind of thing. You're sort of breaking memory management to fix it with the iterable WeakMap approach. Problem two can also exist for destructors as well.
All of this invokes several levels of hell so I would suggest to try to work around it with good program design, good practices, avoiding certain things, etc. It can be frustrating in JS however because of how flexible it is in certain aspects and because it is more naturally asynchronous and event based with heavy inversion of control.
There is one other solution that is fairly elegant but again still has some potentially serious hangups. If you have a class that extends an observable class you can override the event functions. Add your events to other observables only when events are added to yourself. When all events are removed from you then remove your events from children. You can also make a class to extend your observable class to do this for you. Such a class could provide hooks for empty and non-empty so in a since you would be Observing yourself. This approach isn't bad but also has hangups. There is a complexity increase as well as performance decrease. You'll have to keep a reference to object you observe. Critically, it also will not work for leaves but at least the intermediates will self destruct if you destroy the leaf. It's like chaining destroy but hidden behind calls that you already have to chain. A large performance problem is with this however is that you may have to reinitialise internal data from the Observable everytime your class becomes active. If this process takes a very long time then you might be in trouble.
If you could iterate WeakMap then you could perhaps combine things (switch to Weak when no events, Strong when events) but all that is really doing is putting the performance problem on someone else.
There are also immediate annoyances with iterable WeakMap when it comes to behaviour. I mentioned briefly before about functions having scope references and carving. If I instantiate a child that in the constructor that hooks the listener 'console.log(param)' to parent and fails to persist the parent then when I remove all references to the child it could be freed entirely as the anonymous function added to the parent references nothing from within the child. This leaves the question of what to do about parent.weakmap.add(child, (param) => console.log(param)). To my knowledge the key is weak but not the value so weakmap.add(object, object) is persistent. This is something I need to reevaluate though. To me that looks like a memory leak if I dispose all other object references but I suspect in reality it manages that basically by seeing it as a circular reference. Either the anonymous function maintains an implicit reference to objects resulting from parent scopes for consistency wasting a lot of memory or you have behaviour varying based on circumstances which is hard to predict or manage. I think the former is actually impossible. In the latter case if I have a method on a class that simply takes an object and adds console.log it would be freed when I clear the references to the class even if I returned the function and maintained a reference. To be fair this particular scenario is rarely needed legitimately but eventually someone will find an angle and will be asking for a HalfWeakMap which is iterable (free on key and value refs released) but that is unpredictable as well (obj = null magically ending IO, f = null magically ending IO, both doable at incredible distances).
If there is no such mechanism, what is a pattern/convention for such problems?
The term 'cleanup' might be more appropriate, but will use 'destructor' to match OP
Suppose you write some javascript entirely with 'function's and 'var's.
Then you can use the pattern of writing all the functions code within the framework of a try/catch/finally lattice. Within finally perform the destruction code.
Instead of the C++ style of writing object classes with unspecified lifetimes, and then specifying the lifetime by arbitrary scopes and the implicit call to ~() at scope end (~() is destructor in C++), in this javascript pattern the object is the function, the scope is exactly the function scope, and the destructor is the finally block.
If you are now thinking this pattern is inherently flawed because try/catch/finally doesn't encompass asynchronous execution which is essential to javascript, then you are correct. Fortunately, since 2018 the asynchronous programming helper object Promise has had a prototype function finally added to the already existing resolve and catch prototype functions. That means that that asynchronous scopes requiring destructors can be written with a Promise object, using finally as the destructor. Furthermore you can use try/catch/finally in an async function calling Promises with or without await, but must be aware that Promises called without await will be execute asynchronously outside the scope and so handle the desctructor code in a final then.
In the following code PromiseA and PromiseB are some legacy API level promises which don't have finally function arguments specified. PromiseC DOES have a finally argument defined.
async function afunc(a,b){
try {
function resolveB(r){ ... }
function catchB(e){ ... }
function cleanupB(){ ... }
function resolveC(r){ ... }
function catchC(e){ ... }
function cleanupC(){ ... }
...
// PromiseA preced by await sp will finish before finally block.
// If no rush then safe to handle PromiseA cleanup in finally block
var x = await PromiseA(a);
// PromiseB,PromiseC not preceded by await - will execute asynchronously
// so might finish after finally block so we must provide
// explicit cleanup (if necessary)
PromiseB(b).then(resolveB,catchB).then(cleanupB,cleanupB);
PromiseC(c).then(resolveC,catchC,cleanupC);
}
catch(e) { ... }
finally { /* scope destructor/cleanup code here */ }
}
I am not advocating that every object in javascript be written as a function. Instead, consider the case where you have a scope identified which really 'wants' a destructor to be called at its end of life. Formulate that scope as a function object, using the pattern's finally block (or finally function in the case of an asynchronous scope) as the destructor. It is quite like likely that formulating that functional object obviated the need for a non-function class which would otherwise have been written - no extra code was required, aligning scope and class might even be cleaner.
Note: As others have written, we should not confuse destructors and garbage collection. As it happens C++ destructors are often or mainly concerned with manual garbage collection, but not exclusively so. Javascript has no need for manual garbage collection, but asynchronous scope end-of-life is often a place for (de)registering event listeners, etc..
Here you go. The Subscribe/Publish object will unsubscribe a callback function automatically if it goes out of scope and gets garbage collected.
const createWeakPublisher = () => {
const weakSet = new WeakSet();
const subscriptions = new Set();
return {
subscribe(callback) {
if (!weakSet.has(callback)) {
weakSet.add(callback);
subscriptions.add(new WeakRef(callback));
}
return callback;
},
publish() {
for (const weakRef of subscriptions) {
const callback = weakRef.deref();
console.log(callback?.toString());
if (callback) callback();
else subscriptions.delete(weakRef);
}
},
};
};
Although it might not happen immediately after the callback function goes out of scope, or it might not happen at all. See weakRef documentation for more details. But it works like a charm for my use case.
You might also want to check out the FinalizationRegistry API for a different approach.
"A destructor wouldn't even help you here. It's the event listeners
themselves that still reference your object, so it would not be able
to get garbage-collected before they are unregistered."
Not so. The purpose of a destructor is to allow the item that registered the listeners to unregister them. Once an object has no other references to it, it will be garbage collected.
For instance, in AngularJS, when a controller is destroyed, it can listen for a destroy event and respond to it. This isn't the same as having a destructor automatically called, but it's close, and gives us the opportunity to remove listeners that were set when the controller was initialized.
// Set event listeners, hanging onto the returned listener removal functions
function initialize() {
$scope.listenerCleanup = [];
$scope.listenerCleanup.push( $scope.$on( EVENTS.DESTROY, instance.onDestroy) );
$scope.listenerCleanup.push( $scope.$on( AUTH_SERVICE_RESPONSES.CREATE_USER.SUCCESS, instance.onCreateUserResponse ) );
$scope.listenerCleanup.push( $scope.$on( AUTH_SERVICE_RESPONSES.CREATE_USER.FAILURE, instance.onCreateUserResponse ) );
}
// Remove event listeners when the controller is destroyed
function onDestroy(){
$scope.listenerCleanup.forEach( remove => remove() );
}
Javascript does not have destructures the same way C++ does. Instead, alternative design patterns should be used to manage resources. Here are a couple of examples:
You can restrict users to using the instance for the duration of a callback, after which it'll automatically be cleaned up. (This pattern is similar to the beloved "with" statement in Python)
connectToDatabase(async db => {
const resource = await db.doSomeRequest()
await useResource(resource)
}) // The db connection is closed once the callback ends
When the above example is too restrictive, another alternative is to just create explicit cleanup functions.
const db = makeDatabaseConnection()
const resource = await db.doSomeRequest()
updatePageWithResource(resource)
pageChangeEvent.addListener(() => {
db.destroy()
})
The other answers already explained in detail that there is no destructor. But your actual goal seems to be event related. You have an object which is connected to some event and you want this connection to go away automatically when the object is garbage collected. But this won't happen because the event subscription itself references the listener function. Well, UNLESS you use this nifty new WeakRef stuff.
Here is an example:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>
<button onclick="subscribe()">Subscribe</button>
<button id="emitter">Emit</button>
<button onclick="free()">Free</button>
<script>
const emitter = document.getElementById("emitter");
let listener = null;
function addWeakEventListener(element, event, callback) {
// Weakrefs only can store objects, so we put the callback into an object
const weakRef = new WeakRef({ callback });
const listener = () => {
const obj = weakRef.deref();
if (obj == null) {
console.log("Removing garbage collected event listener");
element.removeEventListener(event, listener);
} else {
obj.callback();
}
};
element.addEventListener(event, listener);
}
function subscribe() {
listener = () => console.log("Event fired!");
addWeakEventListener(emitter, "click", listener);
console.log("Listener created and subscribed to emitter");
}
function free() {
listener = null;
console.log("Reference cleared. Now force garbage collection in dev console or wait some time before clicking Emit again.");
}
</script>
</body>
</html>
(JSFiddle)
Clicking the Subscribe button creates a new listener function and registers it at the click event of the Emit button. So clicking the Emit button after that prints a message to the console. Now click the Free button which simply sets the listener variable to null so the garbage collector can remove the listener. Wait some time or force gargabe collection in the developer console and then click the Emit button again. The wrapper listener function now sees that the actual listener (wrapped in a WeakRef) is no longer there and then unsubscribes itself from the button.
WeakRefs are quite powerful but note that there is no guarantee if and when your stuff is garbage collected.
The answer to the question as-stated in the title is FinalizationRegistry, available since Firefox 79 (June 2020), Chrome 84 and derivatives (July 2020), Safari 14.1 (April 2021), and Node 14.6.0 (July 2020)… however, a native JS destructor is probably not the right solution for your use-case.
function create_eval_worker(f) {
let src_worker_blob = new Blob([f.toString()], {type: 'application/javascript'});
let src_worker_url = URL.createObjectURL(src_worker_blob);
async function g() {
let w = new Worker(src_worker_url);
…
}
// Run URL.revokeObjectURL(src_worker_url) as a destructor of g
let registry = new FinalizationRegistry(u => URL.revokeObjectURL(u));
registry.register(g, src_worker_url);
return g;
}
}
Caveat:
Avoid where possible
Correct use of FinalizationRegistry takes careful thought, and it's best avoided if possible. When, how, and whether garbage collection occurs is down to the implementation of any given JavaScript engine. Any behavior you observe in one engine may be different in another engine, in another version of the same engine, or even in a slightly different situation with the same version of the same engine.
…
Developers shouldn't rely on cleanup callbacks for essential program logic. Cleanup callbacks may be useful for reducing memory usage across the course of a program, but are unlikely to be useful otherwise.
A conforming JavaScript implementation, even one that does garbage collection, is not required to call cleanup callbacks. When and whether it does so is entirely down to the implementation of the JavaScript engine. When a registered object is reclaimed, any cleanup callbacks for it may be called then, or some time later, or not at all.
–Mozilla Developer Network

Deleting large Javascript objects when process is running out of memory

I'm a novice to this kind of javascript, so I'll give a brief explanation:
I have a web scraper built in Nodejs that gathers (quite a bit of) data, processes it with Cheerio (basically jQuery for Node) creates an object then uploads it to mongoDB.
It works just fine, except for on larger sites. What's appears to be happening is:
I give the scraper an online store's URL to scrape
Node goes to that URL and retrieves anywhere from 5,000 - 40,000 product urls to scrape
For each of these new URLs, Node's request module gets the page source then loads up the data to Cheerio.
Using Cheerio I create a JS object which represents the product.
I ship the object off to MongoDB where it's saved to my database.
As I say, this happens for thousands of URLs and once I get to, say, 10,000 urls loaded I get errors in node. The most common is:
Node: Fatal JS Error: Process out of memory
Ok, here's the actual question(s):
I think this is happening because Node's garbage cleanup isn't working properly. It's possible that, for example, the request data scraped from all 40,000 urls is still in memory, or at the very least the 40,000 created javascript objects may be. Perhaps it's also because the MongoDB connection is made at the start of the session and is never closed (I just close the script manually once all the products are done). This is to avoid opening/closing the connection it every single time I log a new product.
To really ensure they're cleaned up properly (once the product goes to MongoDB I don't use it anymore and can be deleted from memory) can/should I just simply delete it from memory, simply using delete product?
Moreso (I'm clearly not across how JS handles objects) if I delete one reference to the object is it totally wiped from memory, or do I have to delete all of them?
For instance:
var saveToDB = require ('./mongoDBFunction.js');
function getData(link){
request(link, function(data){
var $ = cheerio.load(data);
createProduct($)
})
}
function createProduct($)
var product = {
a: 'asadf',
b: 'asdfsd'
// there's about 50 lines of data in here in the real products but this is for brevity
}
product.name = $('.selector').dostuffwithitinjquery('etc');
saveToDB(product);
}
// In mongoDBFunction.js
exports.saveToDB(item){
db.products.save(item, function(err){
console.log("Item was successfully saved!");
delete item; // Will this completely delete the item from memory?
})
}
delete in javascript is NOT used to delete variables or free memory. It is ONLY used to remove a property from an object. You may find this article on the delete operator a good read.
You can remove a reference to the data held in a variable by setting the variable to something like null. If there are no other references to that data, then that will make it eligible for garbage collection. If there are other references to that object, then it will not be cleared from memory until there are no more references to it (e.g. no way for your code to get to it).
As for what is causing the memory accumulation, there are a number of possibilities and we can't really see enough of your code to know what references could be held onto that would keep the GC from freeing up things.
If this is a single, long running process with no breaks in execution, you might also need to manually run the garbage collector to make sure it gets a chance to clean up things you have released.
Here's are a couple articles on tracking down your memory usage in node.js: http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2012/05/05/debugging-node-js-memory-leaks/ and https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/11/tracking-down-memory-leaks-in-node-js-a-node-js-holiday-season/.
JavaScript has a garbage collector that automatically track which variable is "reachable". If a variable is "reachable", then its value won't be released.
For example if you have a global variable var g_hugeArray and you assign it a huge array, you actually have two JavaScript object here: one is the huge block that holds the array data. Another is a property on the window object whose name is "g_hugeArray" that points to that data. So the reference chain is: window -> g_hugeArray -> the actual array.
In order to release the actual array, you make the actual array "unreachable". you can break either link the above chain to achieve this. If you set g_hugeArray to null, then you break the link between g_hugeArray and the actual array. This makes the array data unreachable thus it will be released when the garbage collector runs. Alternatively, you can use "delete window.g_hugeArray" to remove property "g_hugeArray" from the window object. This breaks the link between window and g_hugeArray and also makes the actual array unreachable.
The situation gets more complicated when you have "closures". A closure is created when you have a local function that reference a local variable. For example:
function a()
{
var x = 10;
var y = 20;
setTimeout(function()
{
alert(x);
}, 100);
}
In this case, local variable x is still reachable from the anonymous time out function even after function "a" has returned. If without the timeout function, then both local variable x and y will become unreachable as soon as function a returns. But the existence of the anonymous function change this. Depending on how the JavaScript engine is implemented, it may choose to keep both variable x and y (because it doesn't know whether the function will need y until the function actually runs, which occurs after function a returns). Or if it is smart enough, it can only keep x. Imagine that if both x and y points to big things, this can be a problem. So closure is very convenient but at times it is more likely to cause memory issues and can make it more difficult to track memory issues.
I faced same problem in my application with similar functionality. I've been looking for memory leaks or something like that. The size of consumed memory my process has reached to 1.4 GB and depends on the number of links that must be downloaded.
The first thing I noticed was that after manually running the Garbage Collector, almost all memory was freed. Each page that I downloaded took about 1 MB, was processed and stored in the database.
Then I install heapdump and looked at the snapshot of the application. More information about memory profiling you can found at Webstorm Blog.
My guess is that while the application is running, the GC does not start. To do this, I began to run application with the flag --expose-gc, and began to run GC manually at the time of implementation of the program.
const runGCIfNeeded = (() => {
let i = 0;
return function runGCIfNeeded() {
if (i++ > 200) {
i = 0;
if (global.gc) {
global.gc();
} else {
logger.warn('Garbage collection unavailable. Pass --expose-gc when launching node to enable forced garbage collection.');
}
}
};
})();
// run GC check after each iteration
checkProduct(product._id)
.then(/* ... */)
.finally(runGCIfNeeded)
Interestingly, if you do not use const, let, var, etc when you define something in the global scope, it seems be an attribute of the global object, and deleting returns true. This could cause it to be garbage collected. I tested it like this and it seems to have the intended impact on my memory usage, please let me know if this is incorrect or if you got drastically different results:
x = [];
process.memoryUsage();
i = 0;
while(i<1000000) {
x.push(10.5);
}
process.memoryUsage();
delete x
process.memoryUsage();

Why would I need to freeze an object in JavaScript?

It is not clear to me when anyone would need to use Object.freeze in JavaScript. MDN and MSDN don't give real life examples when it is useful.
I get it that an attempt to change such an object at runtime means a crash. The question is rather, when would I appreciate this crash?
To me the immutability is a design time constraint which is supposed to be guaranteed by the type checker.
So is there any point in having a runtime crash in a dynamically typed language, besides detecting a violation better later than never?
The Object.freeze function does the following:
Makes the object non-extensible, so that new properties cannot be added to it.
Sets the configurable attribute to false for all properties of the object. When - configurable is false, the property attributes cannot be changed and the property cannot be deleted.
Sets the writable attribute to false for all data properties of the object. When writable is false, the data property value cannot be changed.
That's the what part, but why would anyone do this?
Well, in the object-oriented paradigm, the notion exists that an existing API contains certain elements that are not intended to be extended, modified, or re-used outside of their current context. The final keyword in various languages is the most suitable analogy of this. Even in languages that are not compiled and therefore easily modified, it still exists, i.e. PHP, and in this case, JavaScript.
You can use this when you have an object representing a logically immutable data structure, especially if:
Changing the properties of the object or altering its "duck type" could lead to bad behavior elsewhere in your application
The object is similar to a mutable type or otherwise looks mutable, and you want programmers to be warned on attempting to change it rather than obtain undefined behavior.
As an API author, this may be exactly the behavior you want. For example, you may have an internally cached structure that represents a canonical server response that you provide to the user of your API by reference but still use internally for a variety of purposes. Your users can reference this structure, but altering it may result in your API having undefined behavior. In this case, you want an exception to be thrown if your users attempt to modify it.
In my nodejs server environment, I use freeze for the same reason I use 'use strict'. If I have an object that I do not want being extended or modified, I will freeze it. If something attempts to extend or modify my frozen object, I WANT my app to throw an error.
To me this relates to consistent, quality, more secure code.
Also,
Chrome is showing significant performance increases working with frozen objects.
Edit:
In my most recent project, I'm sending/receiving encrypted data between a government entity. There are a lot of configuration values. I'm using frozen object(s) for these values. Modification of these values could have serious, adverse side effects. Additionally, as I linked previously, Chrome is showing performance advantages with frozen objects, I assume nodejs does as well.
For simplicity, an example would be:
var US_COIN_VALUE = {
QUARTER: 25,
DIME: 10,
NICKEL: 5,
PENNY: 1
};
return Object.freeze( US_COIN_VALUE );
There is no reason to modify the values in this example. And enjoy the benefits of speed optimizations.
Object.freeze() mainly using in Functional Programming (Immutability)
Immutability is a central concept of functional programming because without it, the data flow in your program is lossy. State history is abandoned, and strange bugs can creep into your software.
In JavaScript, it’s important not to confuse const, with immutability. const creates a variable name binding which can’t be reassigned after creation. const does not create immutable objects. You can’t change the object that the binding refers to, but you can still change the properties of the object, which means that bindings created with const are mutable, not immutable.
Immutable objects can’t be changed at all. You can make a value truly immutable by deep freezing the object. JavaScript has a method that freezes an object one-level deep.
const a = Object.freeze({
foo: 'Hello',
bar: 'world',
baz: '!'
});
When you're writing a library/framework in JS and you don't want some developer to break your dynamic language creation by re-assigning "internal" or public properties.
This is the most obvious use case for immutability.
With the V8 release v7.6 the performance of frozen/sealed arrays is greatly improved. Therefore, one reason you would like to freeze an object is when your code is performance-critical.
What is a practical situation when you might want to freeze an object?
One example, on application startup you create an object containing app settings. You may pass that configuration object around to various modules of the application. But once that settings object is created you want to know that it won't be changed.
This is an old question, but I think I have a good case where freeze might help. I had this problem today.
The problem
class Node {
constructor() {
this._children = [];
this._parent = undefined;
}
get children() { return this._children; }
get parent() { return this._parent; }
set parent(newParent) {
// 1. if _parent is not undefined, remove this node from _parent's children
// 2. set _parent to newParent
// 3. if newParent is not undefined, add this node to newParent's children
}
addChild(node) { node.parent = this; }
removeChild(node) { node.parent === this && (node.parent = undefined); }
...
}
As you can see, when you change the parent, it automatically handles the connection between these nodes, keeping children and parent in sync. However, there is one problem here:
let newNode = new Node();
myNode.children.push(newNode);
Now, myNode has newNode in its children, but newNode does not have myNode as its parent. So you've just broken it.
(OFF-TOPIC) Why are you exposing the children anyway?
Yes, I could just create lots of methods: countChildren(), getChild(index), getChildrenIterator() (which returns a generator), findChildIndex(node), and so on... but is it really a better approach than just returning an array, which provides an interface all javascript programmers already know?
You can access its length to see how many children it has;
You can access the children by their index (i.e. children[i]);
You can iterate over it using for .. of;
And you can use some other nice methods provided by an Array.
Note: returning a copy of the array is out of question! It costs linear time, and any updates to the original array do not propagate to the copy!
The solution
get children() { return Object.freeze(Object.create(this._children)); }
// OR, if you deeply care about performance:
get children() {
return this._PUBLIC_children === undefined
? (this._PUBLIC_children = Object.freeze(Object.create(this._children)))
: this._PUBLIC_children;
}
Done!
Object.create: we create an object that inherits from this._children (i.e. has this._children as its __proto__). This alone solves almost the entire problem:
It's simple and fast (constant time)
You can use anything provided by the Array interface
If you modify the returned object, it does not change the original!
Object.freeze: however, the fact that you can modify the returned object BUT the changes do not affect the original array is extremely confusing for the user of the class! So, we just freeze it. If he tries to modify it, an exception is thrown (assuming strict mode) and he knows he can't (and why). It's sad no exception is thrown for myFrozenObject[x] = y if you are not in strict mode, but myFrozenObject is not modified anyway, so it's still not-so-weird.
Of course the programmer could bypass it by accessing __proto__, e.g:
someNode.children.__proto__.push(new Node());
But I like to think that in this case they actually know what they are doing and have a good reason to do so.
IMPORTANT: notice that this doesn't work so well for objects: using hasOwnProperty in the for .. in will always return false.
UPDATE: using Proxy to solve the same problem for objects
Just for completion: if you have an object instead of an Array you can still solve this problem by using Proxy. Actually, this is a generic solution that should work with any kind of element, but I recommend against (if you can avoid it) due to performance issues:
get myObject() { return Object.freeze(new Proxy(this._myObject, {})); }
This still returns an object that can't be changed, but keeps all the read-only functionality of it. If you really need, you can drop the Object.freeze and implement the required traps (set, deleteProperty, ...) in the Proxy, but that takes extra effort, and that's why the Object.freeze comes in handy with proxies.
I can think of several places that Object.freeze would come in very handy.
The first real world implementation that could use freeze is when developing an application that requires 'state' on the server to match what's in the browser. For instance, imagine you need to add in a level of permissions to your function calls. If you are working in an application there may be places where a Developer could easily change or overwrite the permission settings without even realizing it (especially if the object were being passed through by reference!). But permissions by and large can never change and error'ing when they are changed is preferred. So in this case, the permissions object could be frozen, thereby limiting developer from mistakenly 'setting' permissions erroneously. The same could be said for user-like data like a login name or email address. These things can be mistakenly or maliciously broken with bad code.
Another typical solution would be in a game loop code. There are many settings of game state that you would want to freeze to retain that the state of the game is kept in sync with the server.
Think of Object.freeze as a way to make an object as a Constant. Anytime you would want to have variable constant, you could have an object constant with freeze for similar reasons.
There are also times where you want to pass immutable objects through functions and data passing, and only allow updating the original object with setters. This can be done by cloning and freezing the object for 'getters' and only updating the original with 'setters'.
Are any of these not valid things? It can also be said that frozen objects could be more performant due to the lack of dynamic variables, but I haven't seen any proof of that yet.
The only practical use for Object.freeze is during development. For production code, there is absolutely no benefit for freezing/sealing objects.
Silly Typos
It could help you catch this very common problem during development:
if (myObject.someProp = 5) {
doSomething();
}
In strict mode, this would throw an error if myObject was frozen.
Enforce Coding Protocol / Restriction
It would also help in enforcing a certain protocol in a team, especially with new members who may not have the same coding style as everyone else.
A lot of Java guys like to add a lot of methods to objects to make JS feel more familiar. Freezing objects would prevent them from doing that.
I could see this being useful when you're working with an interactive tool. Rather than:
if ( ! obj.isFrozen() ) {
obj.x = mouse[0];
obj.y = mouse[1];
}
You could simply do:
obj.x = mouse[0];
obj.y = mouse[1];
Properties will only update if the object isn't frozen.
Don't know if this helps, but I use it to create simple enumerations. It allows me to hopefully not get duff data in a database, by knowing the source of the data has been attempted to be unchangeable without purposefully trying to break the code. From a statically typed perspective, it allows for reasoning over code construction.
All the other answers pretty much answer the question.
I just wanted to summarise everything here along with an example.
Use Object.freeze when you need utmost surety regarding its state in the future. You need to make sure that other developers or users of your code do not change internal/public properties. Alexander Mills's answer
Object.freeze has better performance since 19th June, 2019, ever since V8 v7.6 released. Philippe's answer. Also take a look at the V8 docs.
Here is what Object.freeze does, and it should clear out doubts for people who only have surface level understanding of Object.freeze.
const obj = {
name: "Fanoflix"
};
const mutateObject = (testObj) => {
testObj.name = 'Arthas' // NOT Allowed if parameter is frozen
}
obj.name = "Lich King" // Allowed
obj.age = 29; // Allowed
mutateObject(obj) // Allowed
Object.freeze(obj) // ========== Freezing obj ==========
mutateObject(obj) // passed by reference NOT Allowed
obj.name = "Illidan" // mutation NOT Allowed
obj.age = 25; // addition NOT Allowed
delete obj.name // deletion NOT Allowed

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