fix: add unsubscribe mechanism to prevent callback memory leaks #777
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Summary
Fixes a memory leak caused by push-only subscriptions in Phoenix when navigating between experiments. Route-scoped Angular components subscribed to long-lived singleton services without an unsubscribe mechanism, causing callbacks to accumulate and destroyed components to remain in memory.
Issue Description
Core services (
EventDisplay,ActiveVariable) stored callbacks in internal arrays but did not provide a way to remove them. When Angular components were destroyed on navigation, their callbacks remained registered and retained component instances via closures.Over time this led to unbounded memory growth and increasing event dispatch cost.
Steps to Reproduce
Before fix: callback counts and retained component instances grow with each navigation.
Fix
Subscription APIs now return an unsubscribe function, and Angular components clean up subscriptions on destroy.
This makes subscriptions lifecycle-safe and allows destroyed components to be garbage-collected.
Impact
Backward Compatibility
Fully backward-compatible. Existing callers that ignore the returned unsubscribe function continue to work unchanged.