Question

I have an app running on iPAD. Pretty complex one I would say. The main issue I am facing now is the memory crash. After going through several discussion threads, I could not figure out how to resolve it.

All my memory leaks are fixed. While monitoring the heapshots in the instrument, they increase consistently of the order of 1 MB every cycle (I take heaphots at one normal “state” of the app). 80% of the heapshots increases are in “non-objects” category. All of them have a reference count of 1.

Are these non-objects memory hogging a possible reason for my memory crashes? Or is this only a symptom? Should I look for somewhere else for the root cause? If these are probable cause, what is a systematic way of eleminating these memory hogs?

Edit: Added a screen shot. As you can see, there is no call to my code (except the main() at the bottom). Can someone make any sense of the extended details on right side, where can I look for, to remove this 16 bits of memory (non-objects) having a ref count of 1 ? This is just one instance, there are such thousands, causing my memory grow.

Answer 1

I would guess those are simple buffers allocated on the heap, as with malloc(). For all of the ones which were allocated and not deallocated between two heapshots, examine the stack trace to see what caused the allocation. If it’s in your code, make sure you are freeing anything which you allocate like that.

By the way, not all memory management problems result in a true leak. A true leak is an allocation that your code has lost the address to so it can not conceivably free it. A pseudo-leak is where you still have a reference to the object, but your code is just never going to use it again. That is, you’ve stashed it in some data structure somewhere where it will never be accessed again, when you really should have released it and forgotten about it.

So, you may be responsible for the non-object allocations because you are keeping objects around when you don’t need to be.