Caching objects in memory in Javascript

Question

I'm writing a web app which fetches a list of files from the server and displays it. The user can click on a folder to descend into it (without actually leaving the page). Retrieving the list can take a while (~10ms per file, which is a lot when you have 2000 files), so I want to cache the results when possible to avoid having to re-fetch it if the user goes into a subdirectory and then back out.

However if I just store the results in some global variable, they'll quickly fill up all the user's memory. Is there some way to tell the browser "feel free to delete this object if you're low on memory", or to be notified when memory is low?

they'll quickly fill up all the user's memory That's a whole lot of data, probably much more than you should be sending to the client, I would think? If you have to, you might consider saving to the user's hard drive via IndexedDB, maybe — CertainPerformance
– CertainPerformance, Commented Sep 2, 2018 at 20:07
A lot of what I want to cache is the actual HTML elements, since recreating them can be slow. — Rena
– Rena, Commented Sep 5, 2018 at 17:43

Remco · Accepted Answer · 2018-09-02 20:28:19Z

2

If you'd like to store those objects on the users computer, to prevent requesting from the server again you'd probably want to use something like LocalStorage to do so.

Store.js provides a nice API around local storage-solutions.

The hard part for you now will be to check which files belong to a certain folder so you can store it. Something like a tree data-structure might be nice to give shape to these folders, paired with an ID you might be able to map them to a place in localstorage.

answered Sep 2, 2018 at 20:28

Remco

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