Hi y'all,
I was working on a plugin thingie for a certain browser which uses some html form fields and couldn't help wondering about the way these get handled in memory.
More specifically, when for example a textfield gets filled out with one value or another or has one predefined, this obviously has to be stored somewhere, at least until the form is posted. Most browsers/email clients etc however don't seem to apply any limits to this value, which could potentially eat away a lot of memory. What is to stop someone from putting something like
<?
$i = 1;
$n = "rather bloody huge amount of data";
while ($i > 0) {
echo "<form><input type=\"text\" value=\"$n\"></form>";
}
?>
together? ("Ethics"? No such animal I'm afraid..)
If $n is sufficiently large, this eats through the available memory (and a lot of CPU cycles) way before you even start considering to stop the page from loading. (yeah yeah there's always someone with better reflexes, not my point here though :) Even though in above the fact that it's looping isn't helping either (I just wanted a quick example), the size of the value has a lot to say about it as well (otherwise try a lot of text boxes with long predefined values on 1 page instead of looping).
On my box's local webserver the memory didn't get freed from the browser process until another page was loaded or the browser got killed (of course if you'd want to put this in an email message php wouldn't work but surely we're creative enough to get past that). From a remote machine the browser process eventually seemed to consume less but the overall performance did go down the drain (talking MSIE5 Win2k/Solaris versions and Netscape 4 to 6 same versions here).
Riddle me how, riddle me why (or if this has already been discussed to death, humor me) , how to deal with this? (since none of the to me available browsers do :( ) Is it even possible to limit this or is it just the way the implementation goes?
Cheers,
Xander
_____________________________________________________________
Sign up for FREE email from Schimmetje.com at http://www.schimmetje.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Jun 21 2001 - 09:38:52 PDT