BTW, the original bug in the Meteor codebase wasn't a setInterval.
It was that code to replace a certain type of object (a Spark renderer) with a new instance of that object accidentally ended up with a reference to the preceding renderer in a closure assigned somewhere on it, even though that particular closure didn't actually use that reference.
So instead of replacing renderer #N with renderer #(N+1) and GCing #N, we ended up with a stream of renderers which never could be GCed... even though the reference keeping the old ones alive was literally impossible to ever use.
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BTW, the original bug in the Meteor codebase wasn't a setInterval.
It was that code to replace a certain type of object (a Spark renderer) with a new instance of that object accidentally ended up with a reference to the preceding renderer in a closure assigned somewhere on it, even though that particular closure didn't actually use that reference.
So instead of replacing renderer #N with renderer #(N+1) and GCing #N, we ended up with a stream of renderers which never could be GCed... even though the reference keeping the old ones alive was literally impossible to ever use.