Home/ Questions/Q 727879
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-14T06:37:04+00:00

Whilst developing for the iPhone I had a stubborn memory leak that I eventually

  • 0

Whilst developing for the iPhone I had a stubborn memory leak that I eventually tracked down to NSXMLParser. However whilst looking for that it got me thinking about maybe changing a lot of my convenience methods to alloc/release. Is there any good reason for doing that? In a large app I can see how releasing memory yourself quickly is a better idea, but in a small app is there any other difference between the two methods.

NSNumber *numberToAdd = [NSNumber numberWithInt:intValue];
dostuff ...

OR

NSNumber *numberToAdd = [[NSNumber alloc] initWithInt:intValue];
doStuff ...
[numberToAdd release];

cheers gary.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    There is no difference memory-management-wise between those two methods. In a gui app, an NSAutoreleasePool is created and destroyed on every spin of the run loop, so small objects like this will most likely be destroyed within a few microseconds. The only time I could see it mattering is if you’re on a secondary thread and you’re about to create a TON of autoreleased objects. However, you’re always welcome to create and destroy your own autorelease pools.

    • 0