I’m working on a new website that has a different background image for each page. The file sizes of the images are anywhere from 100-200KB. However, I’m monitoring the memory usage of my browsers, and as each image loads, the memory usage jumps by 5-10MB. Why in the world does Flash need so much memory for an image load?
In an attempt to reduce memory usage, upon each image load I pulled the bitmapData from the loader into a new Bitmap object and unloaded and nulled the loader. Unfortunately that didn’t result in any memory decrease (or increase). If I didn’t pull the bitmapData and just unloaded/nulled the loader, the memory is released just fine, but obviously that leaves me without an image.
I guess my question is: is this normal? Does Flash just use extraordinary amounts of memory to store image data? Is there any way to reduce the footprint?
A million thanks to anyone who has any insight.
