I could use some help with this:

*edit - link removed. current server lists seems slow. hopefully it's unrelated

^ That's an asynchronous server browser with expanding player lists. It took some doing, but I think it works quite nicely. It's a really important page and it needs to be right.

It's leaking memory, and it mustn't - it's the kind of thing people may want to leave open.

Info:

It's clever stuff. My first attempt used a plain old async request for some HTML data to replace the server list. That worked well, but I could only refresh so long as each server was collapsed (ie, so long as the player details weren't shown), 'cause each new update would have lost the collapsed/expanded state for each server.

So, the only way to have the whole list completely async, was to parse the markup client-side (and not just the retrieved XML, which is easy, but also the HTML on the page to insert into).

I started with Mootools, ran into trouble and switched to jQuery. Gavin's going to hate me, because this'll mean porting the current chat system to the same. I don't think Prototype'll give us what we need and I'm not writing an HTML parser from scratch.

Anyway – the memory leak. Firefox is notorious, but this is ridiculous. In FF5, I'm looking at a about a MB or two added per request. All the other browsers seem OK. Chrome, Opera, IE (6 and 9 – I've not tested 7 or 8). FF4 seems reasonable. It may be a little bit leaky in each, but nothing that'll drain your RAM dry in an hour, the way FF5 will.

It's tempting to add a 'please switch to a browser that isn't broken' for Firefox 5 users. I guess we can't.

It may be something I've done. I need a guru. That may be Gavin, with all the XML stuff built into the game, he must have some guru-like parsing skills. Parser of Muppets. Ha Ha. Otherwise, maybe I'll get on the jQuery forums or something. Mean time, I don't expect many replies, but just in case anyone here knows their AJAX and wants to take a look.

Thanks

Hi, LD so far i can confirm existing problem (it works fine on Linux btw). The problem seems to be inside the browser - http://support.mozilla.com/questions/837653
Nothing wrong with your HTML... did u try to play with timeouts (its now 1 second)? Sorry I dont code ajax, cant really help. May be we should leave the old chat system and step-by-step move to the new one? (by that time may be we'll have the next version of FF which will work without leaks )

P.S.
1) I dont think there's an error in ajax code... 96.6% its FF engine
2) lets think do we really need such page? Yes, the idea is cool but who is going to open this page and watch it for minutes and hours expecting some1 to join a server?
3) <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10"> can be a temporary solution

wbr

thanks. yeah, 'disable your extensions', they say : ). who on earth would use firefox if not for the extensions? (not that each isnt crippled with every new release anyway). if they go to 6 as quickly as they went from 4 to 5, i see firefox dying a death.

porting the chat code is trivial compared to this stuff. (in javascript terms anyway). it doesnt need rewriting. it's a bit difficult for me to do for other reasons.

we can soon leave the server list synchronous, if we have to, and still keep the expanding lists. 'course, that's another issue. we probably dont want the chat box moving up or down every time a new server gets added to the list. needs planning.


[:anti-death crucifix symbol]

FF and memory use problems never. I only have 127 tabs open using 959.3 MG's of ram.