Repeated retrieval and parsing of XML file causes IE to display an error message

Question

I have a flash application that makes a HTTP call every 120
seconds to retrieve a xml file. This file is being generated with
fresh data every few minutes or so and pushed to the apache web
root with a unix mv command.
I'm using the standard Flash XML object. The HTTP request is
NOT over SSL (I know there is a bug related to this). Here is the
code to make the retrieval:
xmlData = null;
xmlData = new XML();
xmlData.ignoreWhite = true;
xmlData.onLoad = xmlTraverse;
xmlData.load("
http://domain/dir/somefile.xml");
The "xmlTraverse" method was written by my team. There is no
known bug in the parsing logic.
Intermittently and unpredictably, IE will display the
following dialogue box:
"A script in this movie is causing Macromedia Flash Player 8
to run slowly. If it continues to run, your computer may become
unresponive. Do you want to abort the script?"
I originally leaned toward an infinite loop causing this
problem. The timeline jumps back and forth between two frames,
checking in the latter frame if the xml has been loaded and parsed
before allowing execution to move to the next frame. I hardcoded
the loop check to always be false, but this did not produce the
message above (although it pegged my CPU).
The only scenario where I've managed to reproduce the message
above is by making a huge (50 MB) xml file. This consistently
produces the message. But I don't realistically see how our xml
file could ever be over 1 MB.
First, can anyone cite another cause for this message? I'm
starting to lean towards the issue lying in our parsing logic such
as infinite recursion on a badly formed XML file. Second, does
anyone know of a solid xml SAX parsing actionscript utility where
you can assign callbacks to XML nodes? If the problem is in the
parsing, we may have to replace our homegrown solution with
something more robust and proven.

Answer 1

Is it a recursive parsing function? I'm not sure about this,
but I think this message pops up when there are more than 256
iterations in a loop (I've read something about this 256 limit,
that will end while loops if they exceed this, but with another
error message... but again, I'm not totally sure about that).
The message is typically for loops, but I don't know when it
fires. Sometimes it appears for really 'small' loops when you're
using the debugger (e.g. a for loop with 100 iterations), so maybe
it is connected to the time a loop is running. You could place some
trace statements in the xmlTraverse method, to see where the
function was when the message occurs, or take the time the function
needs and check if this might be related to the error.
That's all I can come up with, guess there are people here
with more insight to this...
cheers,
blemmo