I've recently been tasked with ferreting out some memory leaks in an application for my work. I've narrowed down one of the big leaks to a jquery plugin. It appears we're using a modified version of a popular context menu jquery plugin.

It looks like one of the developers before me attempted to add a destroy method. I noticed it wasn't very well written and attempted to rewrite. Here's the meat of my destroy method:

    if (menu.childMenus)

{ for (var i = 0; i < menu.childMenus.length; i++) { $(menu.childMenus[i]).destroy(menu.childMenus[i], 'contextmenu'); } }

var recursiveUnbind = function(node) { $(node).unbind(); //$(node).empty().remove(); $.each(node, function(obj) { recursiveUnbind(obj); }); }; $.each(menu, function() { recursiveUnbind(menu); });

    $(menu).empty().remove();

In my mind this code should blow away all the jquery event binding and remove the dom elements, yet still the plugin leaks gobs of memory in IE7.

The modified plugin with a test page can be found here:
http://www.olduglyhead.com/jquery/leaks/ Clicking the button repeatedly will cause IE7 to leak a bunch of memory.