sIEve

Optimizing applications and especially their resource usage is a job that is carried out mostly by developers and programmers, who have the befitting tools for this type of activities. One of the utilities that can be of assistance in such operations goes by the name of sIEve and is dedicated to handling memory leaks in Microsoft's proprietary web browser.

Getting this piece of kit up and running is a very simple task as there are no special requirements, not even a quick set up is needed. All you have to do is run the executable and start working on the spot.

The interface is quite plain and somewhat crammed because the area reserved to the web browsing activity is not sufficient to hold the entire webpage unless the app is maximized. The commands are at hand, on the right side of the main window, where also the live statistics are displayed inside a table that is updated continuously.

There is also a live chart on the lower part of the GUI, where memory and DOM usage can be viewed and the update speed can be configured to your liking, using one of the available presets.

sIEve comes with two basic functions to help you look at the DOM nodes currently in use and also to the leaks and cycles discovered by the application. For each item on the list it is possible to view the properties or the names and values of each contained element.

There is also a color code to help you identify a lot faster the new items, unchanged ones, as well as increased and decreased reference counting (refcount).

All things considered, sIEve may be a handy tool, but it needs a trained eye to glance at it in order to interpret correctly all the data it supplies. Not too difficult to use, but bringing only a modest set of functions, it may not be one of the best choices once can make for finding and managing memory leaks in Internet Explorer.