I think I found a memory leak in Flash 10.1 involving a particular page

Question

Go to [url]http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/?fbid=o9Nb8jC6wvV[/url] and the browser keeps gobbling up memory until an eventual freeze and crash. I get this result using IE8 in conjunction with flash version 10.1.51.45.

Answer 1

I have experienced something similar, and went on quite an investigation over the past 3 days to work out the cause of the problem.  However, it simply appears to be the new more "efficient" way the garbage collector in 10.1 works.
During execution, my app might use 400mb, then release it.  In 10.0 and earlier versions, that 400mb would be reclaimed by the player pretty much straight away.  However, now it seems to decide that if you have declared you want to use 400mb of RAM yourself, then it decides that for a while it will become a sort of new temporary upper limit for garbage collection.  Thus, it's entirely possible to see memory use climb and climb seemingly unchecked.  I guess now they are working on the idea that if you declared that much RAM can be used by your app at one point, they might as well let it fill up and keep those gc() operations to a minimum.  What's if you then have 400mb of garbage that needs to be cleaned out and you suddenly decide that hey - you want to actually use 400mb yourself?  Well, thankfully it seems that garbage collection runs and then your 400mb is provided.
Interestingly, system.gc() appears to not work anymore.