A Lightweight Approach to Detect Memory Leaks in JavaScript (S)

Abstract

Although with garbage collection support, many JavaScript programs still suffer from memory leaks. These leaks can affect application performance and even cause crashes, especially for single page websites. The existing work on JavaScript memory leak mainly focuses on the static detection of leaks toward certain leak patterns. The application scope of such approaches are limited. Previous techniques used for detecting memory leaks in Javalike languages might be extended to JavaScript. However, how to apply these techniques in JavaScript is still a problem. In this paper, we firstly present many common leak detection heuristics used in garbage-collected languages and investigate their effectiveness on JavaScript. According to the investigation results, we then propose a lightweight multi-snapshots based dynamic leak detection method for JavaScript. The initial experimental results show that the proposed approach is effective.