I'll merge by now, but I'll add a note.

Thanks!

Cool find, I'll try to check at some point if this has any impact on the perf. One particular perf problem is GC pauses while parsing large OBJ files. Not entirely sure if this will make it worse or better. It could now have to collect more stuff as it's no longer leaking, hard to say though without testing :) But ofc a good fix, leaking permanently on the page is worse than one time executed loads (if this even had impact on the load time).

How big was the obj file you were testing? lines or file size? Did you see something significant in the mem profile after the fix? What kind of figures are we talking about?

The .obj is 37MB, 1.02 million lines. The strings would collect between an "invocation" of a specific component in our application that uses the WebGLRenderer. Even after deleting the canvas and disposing() of the objects there would still be one copy of this string in memory which piled up after a couple view changes. It was enough that I was getting 1GB profiles after around 10 or so changes and it was crashing the app.