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Discussion on: An elegant solution for memory leaks in React

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Replies for: I agree with the other replies (that this is just hiding the warning) however I’d call it a failure of React’s error messaging. A “memory leak” is ...

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Nans Dumortier •

Yeah, thanks for your answer, I just went through some test, and must admit that this hook doesn't really solve the leak problem.
Here is a screenshot of the evidence :
a graph showing memory consumption over time, that grows

So you, Aleksandr and Xavier are right, thank you guys for pointing out!

I must say that I was mistaken when reading through this - kind of famous - lib's code. Being downloaded 17000+ times a week, I thought it would use good practices.

I'm going to update the documentation and the article to add a disclaimer about that, and in the meantime I will try to find another elegant solution.

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Nans Dumortier • • Edited

To my surprise, we are getting the same kind of graph with an abort controller (I simply took the example that I posted in this article.
It seems that even cancelling the request causes a form of leak :
a graph with memory consumption going up
The main differences are :

  • the amount of listeners not going through the roof
  • however "Nodes" do
  • the numbers are different, but the memory consumption is still going up

For testing this out, I basically went on the app's page and ran :

const clickOnLink = (href) => document.querySelector(`a[href="/${href}"]`).click()
setInterval(() => clickOnLink("users"), 1000);
setTimeout(() => setInterval(() => clickOnLink("posts"), 1500), 500);

Then I performed an analysis over 2+ minutes