Editing WoW:Memory usage (section)

=== Frames ===
Since a bulk of a frame's existence is on the C/C++ side of things, it's a bit difficult to get a true sense of their memory impact, however it's possible to measure the Lua footprint of the frame alone. It turns out that a frame's Lua footprint is initially just the size of its table representation (76 bytes, in WoW 2.2), there doesn't appear to be any other "magic" internal repository of other data.

Having said that, it's a little tricky to fully test this because many of Lua's internal structures (The global environment, the Lua string table, the internal C library reference table) are dynamically managed and grow with the exponential algorithm mentioned earlier, so it's possible that there's some table entries there being consumed by the frames.

Most puzzling (and the largest reason I suspect there is a hidden internal data structure somewhere) is that there doesn't appear to be a readily measurable impact of :SetScript on a frame, yet the frame seems to manage to keep a reference to its handler quite happily. I'm guessing that each non-nil script handler really consumes about 16 bytes in the form of an entry in the library's reference table, but I could be entirely wrong! - [[User:Flickering|Flickering]] 06:10, 9 August 2007 (UTC)