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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T21:46:14+00:00

I’m writing an app that has a foreground service, content provider, and a Activity

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I’m writing an app that has a foreground service, content provider, and a Activity front end that binds to the service and gets back a List of objects using AIDL. The service does work and updates a database.

If I leave the activity open for 4-8+ hours, and go to the “Running Services” section under settings on the phone (Nexus One) an unusually large amount of memory being used is shown (~42MB).

I figure there is a leak. When I check the heap memory i get Heap size:~18MB, ~2MB allocated, ~16MB free. Analyzing the hprof in Eclipse MAT seems fine, which leads me to theorize that memory is leaking on the stack. Is this even possible? If it is, what can I do to stop or investigate the leak? Is the reported memory usage on the “Running Services” section of android even correct (I assume it is)?

Another note: I have been unable to reproduce this issue when the UI is not up (with only the service running)

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’m writing an app that has a
    foreground service, content provider,
    and a Activity front end that binds to
    the service and gets back a List of
    objects using AIDL.

    If that’s all just one application, get rid of the AIDL and get rid of the content provider. Or, at least, don’t use them yourself — those are for other applications to use. They add overhead that you do not need for stuff inside your own VM.

    …which leads me to theorize that memory is leaking on the stack. Is this even possible?

    Not really. The main application thread stack is trivially small. Other threads have stacks that could get a lot bigger, but I’ll be surprised if you are chewing up 42MB that way.

    If it is, what can I do to stop or
    investigate the leak?

    Since you already did a “spike solution” of testing sans UI and determining that is OK, I’d slowly reintroduce the UI and see when you start getting the problem. One likely candidate problem area would be updating the activity from a background thread, so you might turn that off and see what happens.

    Since your problem isn’t in the heap itself, my guess is that your problem is tied to bitmaps or other things that have lots of off-heap RAM usage. The camera in your avatar is another hint in this direction. 🙂 Make sure you are recycle()-ing your bitmaps and such, and see if that helps any.

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