Today I happended to have a look at my application's window object and was shocked to see that 'i' was defined on it! I doggedly started searching my code to see where the leak had perpetrated itself from. After an hour of debugging, which included using Google's online closure compiler (Thanks Sandy!!) and jslint, I came up with nothing.
It struck me that it could be some of the js-libraries that I was using that were causing the leak, and not my code. I tried doing a binary-search on the js-includes, but that didn't work since the code wouldn't even run without most of those includes. At this point I really didn't know how to even go about trying to fix it!!
A few hacky thoughts later, I decided to introduce this code in my application:
Of course, this relied on the fact that I had inserted a verbiage of console.log() statements in my code at various points (It actually helped to have them!!)
This bit of hackery at least helped me determine that the error happened after a certain set of statements (functions) had executed. From here, it was manual work, checking every function and callback (yes) in my code as well as any library that I was using.
After about 30 minutes, I was able to trace the leak to embed.ly's jQuery library. I also discovered that the fb-complete jQuery library I was using had this leak, but it wasn't the one responsible for the specific instance of the variable 'i' that I was seeing then.
It struck me that it could be some of the js-libraries that I was using that were causing the leak, and not my code. I tried doing a binary-search on the js-includes, but that didn't work since the code wouldn't even run without most of those includes. At this point I really didn't know how to even go about trying to fix it!!
A few hacky thoughts later, I decided to introduce this code in my application:
var _iv = setInterval(function() { if (typeof window.i != "undefined") { clearInterval(_iv); } }, 10);
Of course, this relied on the fact that I had inserted a verbiage of console.log() statements in my code at various points (It actually helped to have them!!)
This bit of hackery at least helped me determine that the error happened after a certain set of statements (functions) had executed. From here, it was manual work, checking every function and callback (yes) in my code as well as any library that I was using.
After about 30 minutes, I was able to trace the leak to embed.ly's jQuery library. I also discovered that the fb-complete jQuery library I was using had this leak, but it wasn't the one responsible for the specific instance of the variable 'i' that I was seeing then.
No comments:
Post a Comment