Does never resolved promise cause memory leak?

angular-promise, angularjs, javascript, memory-leaks, promise

Solution

Well, I'm assuming you don't keep an explicit reference to it since that would force it to stay allocated.

The simplest test I could think of is actually allocating a lot of promises and not resolving them:

var $q = angular.injector(["ng"]).get("$q");
setInterval(function () {
    for (var i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
        var $d = $q.defer();
        $d.promise;
    }
}, 10);

And then watching the heap itself. As we can see in the Chrome profiling tools, this accumulates the needed memory to allocate a 100 promises and then just "stays there" at less than 15 megabyes for the whole JSFIddle page

From the other side, if we look at the `$q` source code

We can see that there is no reference from a global point to any particular promise but only from a promise to its callbacks. The code is very readable and clear. Let's see what if you do however have a reference from the callback to the promise.

var $q = angular.injector(["ng"]).get("$q");
console.log($q);
setInterval(function () {
    for (var i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
        var $d = $q.defer();
        (function ($d) { // loop closure thing
            $d.promise.then(function () {
                console.log($d);
            });
        })($d);
    }
}, 10);

So after the initial allocation - it seems like it's able to handle that as well :)

We can also see some interesting patterns of GC if we let his last example run for a few more minutes. We can see that it takes a while - but it's able to clean the callbacks.

In short - at least in modern browsers - you don't have to worry about unresolved promises as long as you don't have external references to them

Problem

I have a `Promise`. I created it to cancel an AJAX request if needed. But since I don't need to cancel that AJAX, I've never resolved it and AJAX completed successfully. A simplified snippet: ``` var defer = $q.defer(); $http({url: 'example.com/some/api', timeout: defer.promise}).success(function(data) { // do something }); // Never defer.resolve() because I don't need to cancel that ajax. What happens to this promise after request? ``` Do never resolved promises like that cause memory leaks? Do you have any advice about how to manage `Promise` life cycle?

Original source