I’ve encountered a problem where bitmaps without a linkage assigned in the library are never removed from memory. This is in Actionscript 3.0. Say I have a movieclip, and inside it is a bitmap dragged from the library that has not been exported for actionscript. Once all references to the movieclip are cleared and it is removed from the display list, the memory allocated for the bitmap is never released. Tracing the program, it appears the bitmap was converted to a shape object. Calling graphics.clear() on the shape object does not clear up the memory either.
I've tried drawing the movieclip into a bitmapdata object and then calling bitmapdata.dispose(), but that doesn't work either.
Once linkage is assigned, flash recognizes the object as a bitmapdata object and the bitmap's memory is released after garbage collection. The problem there is, the bitmap becomes it's original size, ignoring all transformation done when it was dragged to the stage.
Has anyone encountered this issue? It seems like an enormous problem, I can't believe everyone who uses bitmaps from the library exports every single one of them.
Thanks