How synchronous AJAX call could cause memory leak?

Question

I understand this general advice given against the use of synchronous ajax calls, because the synchronous calls block the UI rendering.

The other reason generally given is memory leak isssues with synchronous AJAX.

From the MDN docs -

Note: You shouldn't use synchronous XMLHttpRequests because, due to the inherently asynchronous nature of networking, there are various ways memory and events can leak when using synchronous requests. The only exception is that synchronous requests work well inside Workers.

How synchronous calls could cause memory leaks?

I am looking for a practical example. Any pointers to any literature on this topic would be great.

Answer 1

If XHR is implemented correctly per spec, then it will not leak:

An XMLHttpRequest object must not be garbage collected if its state is OPENED and the send() flag is set, its state is HEADERS_RECEIVED, or its state is LOADING, and one of the following is true:

It has one or more event listeners registered whose type is readystatechange, progress, abort, error, load, timeout, or loadend.

The upload complete flag is unset and the associated XMLHttpRequestUpload object has one or more event listeners registered whose type is progress, abort, error, load, timeout, or loadend.

If an XMLHttpRequest object is garbage collected while its connection is still open, the user agent must cancel any instance of the fetch algorithm opened by this object, discarding any tasks queued for them, and discarding any further data received from the network for them.

So after you hit .send() the XHR object (and anything it references) becomes immune to GC. However, any error or success will put the XHR into DONE state and it becomes subject to GC again. It wouldn't matter at all if the XHR object is sync or async. In case of a long sync request again it doesn't matter because you would just be stuck on the send statement until the server responds.

However, according to this slide it was not implemented correctly at least in Chrome/Chromium in 2012. Per spec, there would be no need to call .abort() since the DONE state means that the XHR object should already be normally GCd.

I cannot find even slightest evidence to back up the MDN statement and I have contacted the author through twitter.

Answer 2

I think that memory leaks are happening mainly because the garbage collector can't do its job. I.e. you have a reference to something and the GC can not delete it. I wrote a simple example:

var getDataSync = function(url) {
    console.log("getDataSync");
    var request = new XMLHttpRequest();
    request.open('GET', url, false);  // `false` makes the request synchronous
    try {
        request.send(null);
        if(request.status === 200) {
            return request.responseText;
        } else {
            return "";
        }
    } catch(e) {
        console.log("!ERROR");
    }
}

var getDataAsync = function(url, callback) {
    console.log("getDataAsync");
    var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
    xhr.open("GET", url, true);
    xhr.onload = function (e) {
        if (xhr.readyState === 4) {
            if (xhr.status === 200) {
                callback(xhr.responseText);
            } else {
                callback("");
            }
        }
    };
    xhr.onerror = function (e) {
        callback("");
    };
    xhr.send(null);
}

var requestsMade = 0
var requests = 1;
var url = "http://missing-url";
for(var i=0; i<requests; i++, requestsMade++) {
    getDataSync(url);
    // getDataAsync(url);
}

Except the fact that the synchronous function blocks a lot of stuff there is another big difference. The error handling. If you use getDataSync and remove the try-catch block and refresh the page you will see that an error is thrown. That's because the url doesn't exist, but the question now is how garbage collector works when an error is thrown. Is it clears all the objects connected with the error, is it keeps the error object or something like that. I'll be glad if someone knows more about that and write here.

Answer 3

Sync XHR block thread execution and all objects in function execution stack of this thread from GC.

E.g.:

function (b) { 
  var a = <big data>;
  <work with> a and b
  sync XHR
}

Variables a and b are blocked here (and whole stack too). So, if GC started working then sync XHR has blocked stack, all stack variables will be marked as "survived GC" and be moved from early heap to the more persistent. And a tone of objects that should not survive even the single GC will live many Garbage Collections and even references from these object will survive GC.

About claims stack blocks GC, and that object marked as long-live objects: see section Conservative Garbage Collection in Clawing Our Way Back To Precision. Also, "marked" objects GCed after the usual heap is GCed, and usually only if there is still need to free more memory (as collecting marked-and-sweeped objs takes more time).

UPDATE: Is it really a leak, not just early-heap ineffective solution? There are several things to consider.

• How long these object will be locked after request is finished?
• Sync XHR can block stack for a unlimited amount of time, XHR has no timeout property (in all non-IE browsers), network problems are not rare.
• How much UI elements are locked? If it block 20M of memory for just 1 sec == 200k lead in a 2min. Consider many background tabs.
• Consider case when single sync blocks tone of resources and browser goes to swap file
• When another event tries to alter DOM in may be blocked by sync XHR, another thread is blocked (and whole it's stack too)
• If user will repeat the actions that lead to the sync XHR, the whole browser window will be locked. Browsers uses max=2 thread to handle window events.
• Even without blocking this consumes lots of OS and browser internal resources: thread, critical section resources, UI resources, DOM ... Imagine that your can open (due to memory problem) 10 tabs with sites that use sync XHR and 100 tabs with sites that use async XHR. Is not this memory leak.

Answer 4

If the synchronous call is interrupted (i.e. by a user event re-using the XMLHttpRequest object) before it completes, then the outstanding network query can be left hanging, unable to be garbage collected.

This is because, if the object that initiated the request does not exist when the request returns, the return cannot complete, but (if the browser is imperfect) remains in memory. You can easily cause this using setTimeout to delete the request object after the request has been made but before it returns.

I remember I had a big problem with this in IE, back around 2009, but I would hope that modern browsers are not susceptible to it. Certainly, modern libraries (i.e. JQuery) prevent the situations in which it might occur, allowing requests to be made without having to think about it.

Answer 5

Memory leaks using syncronous AJAX requests are often caused by:

• using setInterval/setTimout causing circular calls.
• XmlHttpRequest - when the reference is removed, so xhr becomes inaccessible

Memory leak happens when the browser for some reason doesn’t release memory from objects which are not needed any more.

This may happen because of browser bugs, browser extensions problems and, much more rarely, our mistakes in the code architecture.

Here's an example of a memory leak being cause when running setInterval in a new context:

var
Context  = process.binding('evals').Context,
Script   = process.binding('evals').Script,
total    = 5000,
result   = null;

process.nextTick(function memory() {
  var mem = process.memoryUsage();
  console.log('rss:', Math.round(((mem.rss/1024)/1024)) + "MB");
  setTimeout(memory, 100);
});

console.log("STARTING");
process.nextTick(function run() {
  var context = new Context();

  context.setInterval = setInterval;

  Script.runInContext('setInterval(function() {}, 0);',
                      context, 'test.js');
  total--;
  if (total) {
    process.nextTick(run);
  } else {
    console.log("COMPLETE");
  }
});