I've got a javascript loop that triggers every time the page receives an update via websocket. This loop persists usually even after the next websocket update is received. The result is multiple loops begin running and page performance degrades rapidly. Each loop is critical though and only becomes obsolete until the next update.
Is there a way to terminate an active loop from another function or am I plainly just thinking about this the wrong way?
You have a conditional in your loop that looks for a global flag, and when the update is received set the flag to False.
window.setTimeout(…).Usually you would set a flag/condition outside of the loop that get's checked on every iteration.
So..
while(true){
// Do stuff
if(condition == false){
break;
}
}
In your case I think what you could have is a queue of updates. So your loop would check the queue - see that it has four updates since it last did it's thing - then it does whatever it does. New websocket updates come in - loop finishes what it was doing - comes back and checks the queue again.
while (condition) {...} where condition is available to an outer scope and can be modified independently. It might need to be an expression since simply toggling a boolean might not be enough, e.g. give each instance of the update function a unique id and when starting a new one, change the current id.