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Old 16-Sep-2010, 4:10 PM   #14
andy.s.lee
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Join Date: Dec 2009
Posts: 54
tbird2340,

It looks like you are either using Chrome or Safari as your web browser.

Unfortunately, there is a pretty nasty flaw in the way Chrome and Safari (or any web browser derived from the Webkit project) handle vector drawing in the Google Maps API. Whenever the vector draw feature is enabled in one of these browsers, the memory consumption of the browser suddenly climbs by hundreds of megabytes. On some versions of the browsers or on systems with limited RAM, this is enough to crash the browser or bring the system to a slow crawl.

The problem seems to be related to the way the Javascript engine allocates unnecessarily large buffers to draw a simple line over the map and then also a failure of the garbage collection system to free that memory when the line drawing is complete. Some of these problems reside in the specific Javascript engines in Chrome (V8) and Safari (Nitro/SquirrelFish), while others stem from memory leak issues in the Webkit core itself.

To avoid crashing people's browsers or causing system-wide slowdowns (due to high memory consumption), we've had to disable the vector drawing option on Webkit derived browsers. If these memory problems get fixed, then we will be able re-enable this option in the future.

In the meantime, I would suggest using a non-Webkit based browser (e.g., Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, etc.) to experiment with the "show lines" feature.
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