Major memory leak with TLF + Flash Pro CS5
Nov 10, 2010 7:58 AM
I've come across a major bug with TLF in Flash CS5 while trying to figure out why a friends SWF was leaking memory in a major way. I profiled his SWF and turns out TLF was the cause. After some quick tests, I narrowed down exactly how to replicate the issue, and it’s a fairly common use case. I'm not sure how this wasn't noticed before.
Set up- Create a TLF TextField in Flash Pro. Convert it to a Movieclip. Put the TLF-MC on your timeline but use empty frames so the MC is only on the timeline for part of the time, so when you run your SWF, you'll see the movieclip blinking. Run and then watch memory consumption go through the roof. While "blinking" isn't a common use case, its very common to have a movieclip that only exists for a short time, and then removed. It appears as if Flash Pro is creating TLF instances, and then not destroying them, and when the playhead comes back around, its creates another instance, and there's the leak.
I put an example SWF here with Hi-Res Stats graph so you can see the memory climb: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/189315/TLF_MemTest.swf
and zip file containing the Flash CS5 .fla here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/189315/Flash_TLF_Mem_Leak.zip
I consider this a major bug. I've also posted this bug to the Adobe feature request/bug form since Flash Pro doesn’t' have a public bug base.
