Building a Spry chat

Question

I'm using loadurl to build a chat application.
quote:
var cTimer;
cTimer = setTimeout('updatechat();',3000);
x = null;
function sendchat() {
document.getElementById('inputtext').focus();
document.inputs.inputtext.value = "";
updatechat();
function updatechat() {
currentTime = new Date();
time = currentTime.getTime();
clearInterval(cTimer);
request = Spry.Utils.loadURL("GET",
"hubchat.php?function=updatechat&sid=$sid&time=" + time,
false, ChatSuccessCallback, {errorCallback: ChatErrorCallback });
function ChatSuccessCallback(request) {
if (request.xhRequest.responseText!='') {
x=document.getElementById('chatbox');
Spry.Utils.setInnerHTML('chatbox',
x.innerHTML+request.xhRequest.responseText );
document.getElementById('chatbox').scrollTop=document.getElementById('chatbox').scrollHeig ht;
cTimer = setTimeout('updatechat()', 3000);
request=null;
x=null;
function ChatErrorCallback(request) {
cTimer = setTimeout('updatechat()', 3000);
Here is my html:
quote:
<div id="chatbox" class="chatbox">
</div>
<div id="input" class="input">
<form action='hubchat.php' method='GET' name='inputs'
id='inputs' onsubmit="return Spry.Utils.submitForm('inputs',
sendchat);" style="display: inline;">
<input
name="inputtext" id="inputtext" type="text" class="textfield"
size="69" maxlength="300" />
<input type='submit' name='submit' id='submit'
value='Submit' class='thead' >
<input name='function' type='hidden' value='sendchat'
/>
<input name='sid' type='hidden' value='$sid' />
</form></div>
$sid is php generated. All it really means is what 'room' the
user is in.
The loadURL function calls a php script that uses PHP
sessions to only return the lines of text from a database that are
newer than the last time updatechat was requested. This uses less
bandwidth than using an entire dataset, the response is blank if
there are no new messages.
The problem I am seeing is that each time my updatechat
function is ran, the memory usage goes up. As you can see in my
javascript, I am running that function every 3 seconds. The memory
that is being used for each call never gets released until the
browser is closed.
This is fine if you only have the page loaded for 30-60
minutes. If you mess around and leave your browser window open
overnight, you will wake up to see IE consuming almost 200,000K of
ram. Ouch!
Does anybody see anything in my javascript that can be
changed to be easier on memory?

Answer 1

I'm experiencing these issues too. I've tried all the usual
tricks to bypass IE's caching but to no avail.
I'm currently working on a system monitoring application,
which needs to refresh the xml every 5 seconds. Given the above
issues, i'm having to resort to Firefox in order to run properly
and not to over inflate the memory footprint.