Flash Embedded FLV Memory Leak

Question

I am making a game where I have several small character MovieClips which appear on screen randomly. There can be several characters of the same type, and when they are removed from the stage I store them in a memory pool to reuse them.

These characters have several different keyframes which I call to make them do specific things, like fly, land, etc. To improve performance flvs were made for their different actions and these have been embedded in the timeline.

I am having a problem where the amount of memory assigned to Video is constantly increasing as the game is played, even though I am not making more instances of the characters. I have been researching into garbage collecting video but all the stuff I find is for when using the FLVPlayback component and I haven't found anything helpful.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks!

Answer 1

How much is your memory increasing? If it's starting at ie. 80 MB and slowy increasing ie. to 140, and then either staying there or decreasing to 120 and again going slightly up, then there's no need to worry. Unfortunately that's how the Flash GC works. Even if you're not leaking any memory it will slowly show memory increase (and then sudden bob down, as the GC collects trash, and again slowly up).

However, it could be also that you have a real memory leak, but for that to assess, you'd need to post some code. Btw, using memory-pools is a great idea in games, good you're doing it already.