Question

I am using the Instruments tool to find the Leaks in my application. While checking the Leaks in my application, I am able to see the Allocation tab too.

So far, I never used that allocations tab in the instruments tool. I just checked what it could be and I am able to see the #All Allocations * field. Which shows the Overall Bytes used by the application. I am shocked to see that the size is keep on increasing.

Should I worry about only the Memory leaks not the Allocations?
And the #All allocations meant for the current application size or overall application size ?

Answer 1

The allocations are useful to show your App memory footprint. If you present a modalViewController and dismiss it (and you repeat it), and you see that your Application live bytes keeps increasing, there’s something wrong. Memory leaks is useful, to see memory that was allocated and you lost a reference to it. Using ARC helps, but you can still have memory leaks (circular referencing for example). Allocations also helps you understand where memory is allocated and never released. For example a NSArray full of objects, that you are not using, but you are still keeping alive. For your questions:

1) You should worry about both.

2) Live bytes shows your current application size (virtual memory). Overall application size, is exactly what it says: “The total number of allocations in the selected time range”.

You can also check this.