Question

I’ve got a question about treating references to jQuery objects.

Let suppose in my app I have a DOM element DIV with ID=some_widget, it is supposed to live during all the application runtime and be used quite often in the code.

1) So if I keep a reference to it in a global var during application runtime:

var someWidget = $("#some_widget") 

it will create jquery objects once, but will consume memory during application run, but when I use someWidget it wont create jquery object again, so this can speed up the process.

2) if I will alway use the call of $(“#some_widget”) in the code, it won’t consume memory constantly, but every time I use $. it will take time jQuery to construct the object.

Am I right? What approach is more sufficient?
Can keeping the references to many object end up with memory leak?
what does it depend on, what do you think?

Answer 1

Yes, you can cache your jQuery object by declaring it in a variable. This is in fact considered a best practice for re-used objects.