May 9, 2000 - Boosting Performance by Removing Old Instances | WebReference

May 9, 2000 - Boosting Performance by Removing Old Instances

Yehuda Shiran May 9, 2000
Boosting Performance by Removing Old Instances
Tips: May 2000

Yehuda Shiran, Ph.D.
Doc JavaScript

When dealing with heavy object models (e.g., Word.Application) and application instances in Internet Explorer, it is extremely important to keep an eye on system resources. Once we've finished handling an instance of an application, we must get rid of it in order to free the memory taken up by the instance of the object. The only way of doing this in JScript is the Quit() method of the program's Application object. Here's an example:

var wdApp = new ActiveXObject("Word.Application");
wdApp.Quit(); // tidy up

In Visual Basic, unlike JScript (and VBScript), setting the object variable to Nothing is enough to free the memory. Furthermore, if there are no other "live" references to the object, such an assignment operation causes the application to shut down. Unfortunately, in JScript we must use the Quit() method to tidy up after we have finished using an object. Setting the variable to a zero-length string or null is just good practice, nothing more.