Webgl Garbage Collection

Hello
I noticed that webgl isnt clearing memory so i did a small test, i created a new empty project, added one script to create a big byte array, one button to remove the reference, one button to do garbage collection
What happened was that when i clear the reference the already created bytes arent being cleared, and calling GC.Collect isnt working as well since some threads that that calling it in webgl wont do effect since it only clears memory on the start of the frame
So how do we clear that memory? Lets say we're unzipping a file or doing texture operations that uses byte arrays how do we clear that memory after that?

 

What editor version? Is it a development build? If not, try a normal or release build.

Could you post your test code? Perhaps there's a simple oversight, such as assigning the byte array to a field so it won't be garbage collected.

 

We tested it on 2020.3.36, and on 2022.3.7f1

Here is the test code:

public class MemoryClearingTest : MonoBehaviour

{

    public int size;

    public byte[] byteArray = null;



    public void OnSizeChanged(string newSize)

    {

        try

        {

            size = int.Parse(newSize);  

        }

        catch (Exception e)

        {

            Debug.Log(e);

        }

    }

 

    public void CreateBytes()

    {

        if (size == 0)

        {

            size = 20;

        }

        byteArray = new byte[size * 1024 * 1024];

        for (int i = 0; i < byteArray.Length; i++)

        {

            byteArray[I] = (byte)(i % 256);

        }

    }

   

    public void ClearReference()

    {

        byteArray = null;

    }



    public void GarbageCollect()

    {

        GC.Collect();

    }



}[/I]

What im doing is creating a new byte array and then releasing the reference but it remains in the memory and if you keep creating it it'll crash in the end
Saw documentations that you should try to add buffers and reuse memory, but since its an old version alot of the file related functions were still not supporting NativeArray and so it uses alot of byte arrays

 

Does this give you the expected behaviour in the editor or a desktop build?

 

Only in the Webgl Build, i saw online that Webgl clears memory between frames and when you reload scenes, but after testing it didnt seem to be clearing any memory
In the test memory keeps growing until it says that its out of memory when it reaches the 2 gb threshold