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Memory leak in React caused by useEffect not cleaning up properly with event listeners

šŸ‘€ Views: 3 šŸ’¬ Answers: 1 šŸ“… Created: 2025-06-07
react memory-leak useeffect JavaScript

I'm performance testing and I tried several approaches but none seem to work. Can someone help me understand I'm migrating some code and This might be a silly question, but I've been experiencing a memory leak in my React application when using `useEffect` to manage event listeners. I have the following code in my component: ```javascript import React, { useEffect } from 'react'; const MyComponent = () => { const handleResize = () => { console.log('Window resized'); }; useEffect(() => { window.addEventListener('resize', handleResize); // Attempting to clean up the event listener return () => { window.removeEventListener('resize', handleResize); }; }, []); return <div>Resize the window!</div>; }; export default MyComponent; ``` Initially, I thought this was implemented correctly, but using the React DevTools shows that my component is not unmounting properly and memory usage keeps increasing. I suspect it might be related to how I've set up the cleanup function. I've checked that the component isn't being re-mounted unnecessarily and that it correctly calls the cleanup function upon unmounting, but I still see the scenario. I also verified that the `handleResize` function isn't defined inside the `useEffect` to prevent it from being a new instance on every render. My React version is 17.0.2. Any ideas why the event listener might not be removed correctly, or how I can debug this memory leak further? Could it be something else in my component or app that I’m overlooking? Any ideas what could be causing this? For context: I'm using Javascript on macOS. What's the best practice here? This is happening in both development and production on Ubuntu 22.04. Thanks for any help you can provide! Thanks for any help you can provide! Thanks, I really appreciate it! I recently upgraded to Javascript LTS. Any advice would be much appreciated.