Yesterday I wrote about Internet Explorer 7 starting to behave like mad when reading feeds with the built-in Feeds functionality. This morning when reading my feeds I specifically studied the usage of GDI Objects in the Task Manager, and these are my findings:

GDI Objects

Action

1.656

After started IE7 and watched first feed

6.037

After reading about 20 different feeds, in the same IE7 tab

811

Browsed to a non-feed site in the same tab

1.054

Continued reading feeds in the same tab

622

Opened a new site in a new tab and closed the one I used for reading feeds

As you can see the  number of GDI objects is really getting high numbers when reading feeds using Internet Explorer 7, but browsing ordinary sites does not get that high numbers. This behavior affects me a lot since I usually read feeds in one tab and opens up the posts I need to read more on in a new tab, which of course causes even more GDI Objects.

There must be some bug in IE7 which causes the document/tab not to release the objects while browsing feeds, and my guess is that it has something to do with the XSL transformation.

So a tip, or workaround for now, is that once in a while close the tab you are using for reading feeds - or why not restart Internet Explorer 7 more often…