If I create a new website in VS2008 and drag a TookitScriptManager control (either from the Ajax Toolkit Apr 12 2010, Stable version 3.5.40412.0 or from the November 2009 version 3.0.31106.0) on to the default.aspx page then run it using Internet Explorer 7 as the brower then the iexplore.exe process increases it's memory usage by just under 2Mb every time I refresh the page. If I change from debug mode to release mode and open the same page in Internet Explorer 7 then the memory usage increases by just under 1Mb every time I refresh the page. The latest version of Firefox (3.6.3) exhibits the same memory usage increase but reclaims the leaked memory periodically so it never becomes a problem. IE8 does not exhibit the problem presumably because it is doing more aggresive garbage collection after every page is unloaded.
I think it would be much better to fix the memory leak rather than rely on people using the very latest version of a browser in order to clean up the memory leak for them. There are still a lot of people out there using IE7.
Comments: I logged this bug and I've just checked it using the latest framework v3.5 and framework v4 compatible Ajax ToolkitScriptManager (I couldn't test V2.0 because it doesn't seem to work with VS2010 but v3.5 is still v2 under the hood so it's a good enough test for me). In both cases the memory leak seems to have been fixed although ironically IE9 with v4 shows the greatest jump in memory usage of the iexplore.exe process on every refresh. It's pretty small though - nowhere near the leak that was initally reported and certainly nothing I'm bothered about. Thanks for fixing it!
I think it would be much better to fix the memory leak rather than rely on people using the very latest version of a browser in order to clean up the memory leak for them. There are still a lot of people out there using IE7.
Comments: I logged this bug and I've just checked it using the latest framework v3.5 and framework v4 compatible Ajax ToolkitScriptManager (I couldn't test V2.0 because it doesn't seem to work with VS2010 but v3.5 is still v2 under the hood so it's a good enough test for me). In both cases the memory leak seems to have been fixed although ironically IE9 with v4 shows the greatest jump in memory usage of the iexplore.exe process on every refresh. It's pretty small though - nowhere near the leak that was initally reported and certainly nothing I'm bothered about. Thanks for fixing it!