Flex Can Not Unload Applications From Memory! QED

Question

Hi,
at work we are trying to load and unload Flex Applications from a long standing shell application. We have studied the appropriate documentation, especially this
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/loading_applications.pdf
but we have found that Flex simply will nor release memory once used, no matter how simple the flex application. I have put a couple of posts on my blog about it
http://www.dz015.com/?p=139
http://www.dz015.com/?p=166
In particular the second post seems to highlight what I would consider to be a bug.
What do other people think.
Has anybody out there successfully loaded and unloaded flex applications from within a shell application over a long period of time?
Conrad

Answer 1

Styles can pin an application or module in memory in 3.x versions of Flex but this has been fixed in Flex 4. There are other things that can cause memory leaks. Probably the easiest one to run into, especially with a shell application, are leaks caused by resource bundles.
If a sub-application or module uses components that use ResourceBundles that are not used by the main application, those resource bundles will get registered with the ResourceManager and pin the first instance of the application or module. You can use the -compiler.keep-generated-actionscript compiler option to see which resource bundles the module and main application are using. The resource bundles are listed in the "compiledResourceBundleNames" object of the info() function. You can force the main application to have those additional resource bundles by adding the resource bundle metadata to the main application. For example, to add the "controls" resource bundle, you would add to the main application MXML file: <mx:Metadata>[ResourceBundle("controls")]</mx:Metadata> If you are loading your resource bundles as modules, make sure the resource modules have completed loading before loading the module that is being pinned.
More information about leaks is available here: http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui/2009/08/what_we_know_about_unloading_m.html
-Darrell