Garbage collection issue as3

Question

Having real problems with garbage collection in as3
Currently working on a project that is using a main movie
clip to load other movie clips dynamicly, using loadURL.these sub
movieclips are rather heavy in size, and function as standalone
modules.
Our problem is that when we removeChild of the sub clips it
is still present in memory (which from what I have read is normal
untill garbage collection cycle is fired) however it doesn't seem
to ever get removed.
how can we safely load movieclips and remove all references
to them to make them eligible for garbage collection? current
approach we are using is to publicly state the loader the say new
loader() in an attempt to recycle rather that to try to send for
garbage collection

Answer 1

Hi ajmcfarlane,
This is my first post here. I'm fairly new to AS3 still and
have been getting my education from a number of places. The best
education i have found is from the book located at
http://www.learningactionscript3.com/
Rich Shupe address this problem of removing the child from
memory. I Downloaded your file and found 2 problems and resolved
one of them. By now you might have already solved this anyway.
To remove the child from the Display List use -->
removeChild(myChildObject);
To remove the object from memory use --> myChildObject =
null;
You did these two steps but in the incorrect order, just by
moving the 'myChildObject = null' under the removeChild code makes
it work.
I found running a few trace statements after fixing the first
problem, i found the second problem. The error of trying to remove
a child when it is no longer there.
You just need to rework the design so that the order of
events fires as you want. Below is the traces i used and the output
that is received.
function Click1(e:MouseEvent){
trace("four ", loadedcontent);
modLoader.unload();
modLoader = null;
function unloadCompleteHandler(event:Event):void{
trace("one ", loadedcontent);
removeChild(loadedcontent);
trace("two ", loadedcontent);
loadedcontent = null;
trace("three ", loadedcontent);
output
Loaded mem: 20668 KB
four [object MainTimeline]
one [object MainTimeline]
two [object MainTimeline]
three null
unLoaded mem: 23352 KB
So you can see the click event is firing of the unload first,
when i think you want that last.
I hope this has been of some help :)