Let's make it immediately clear: this is not a question about memory leak! I have a page which allows the user to enter some data and a JavaScript to handle this data and produce a result. The JavaScript produces incremental outputs on a DIV, something like this:
(function()
{
var newdiv = document.createElement("div");
newdiv.innerHTML = produceAnswer();
result.appendChild(newdiv);
if (done) {
return;
} else {
setTimeout(arguments.callee, 0);
}
})();
Under certain circumstances the computation will produce so much data that IE8 will fail with this message:
not enough storage when dealing with too much data
The question is: is there way I can work out how much data is too much data?
as I said there is no bug to solve. It's a genuine out of memory because the computation requires to create too many html elements.
My idea would be to run a function before executing the computation to work out ahead if the browser will succeed. But to do so, in a generic way, I think I need to find the memory available to my browser.
Any suggestion is welcome.
Javascript (in the browser) is run in a sandbox, which means that it is fenced-off from accessing things that could cause security issues such as local files, system resources etc - so no, you can't detect memory usage.
As the other answers state, you can make the task easier for the browser by pausing between implementations or using less resource-intensive code, but every browser has its limits.