Memory leak in demo sample

aowenb

Hi,

I've been tracking down a memory leak in our project, and after stripping the code back to an empty sparrow stage the leak remained.

I then tried the latest website release of sparrow and compiled the demo sample which leaks even faster than our project (around 100k/s).

I get the same result with the latest release on git hub.

I'm running Xcode 4.6.1 and profiling in the iPad 6.1 simulator.

Does anyone else have this problem?

Thanks,

Andy

codemastor

Hey, I got the same problem. It's really annoying. Is this a known issue??

Daniel

Are you using iOS 7 or older? iOS 7 still has some problems (that are hopefully not Sparrow related).

Furthermore, please try to profile on an actual device; I've seen the simulator produce memory leaks regularly, that do not happen on a real iOS.

If that doesn't help, please tell me -- then I'll have a look at it, of course.

aowenb

Running the iOS 6.1 simulator the demo sample leaks around 100k/s ...on an iPhone 4 device running iOS 5.1.1 it leaks around 5k/s

I've left this running and it just continues to accumulate 70+mb of allocations...

This is testing using the XCode allocations profile tool

Daniel

Thanks for the report, I'll look into that!

Daniel

I can't reproduce this -- just tried with my iPhone 4S, compiled with Xcode 4.6.3 in both debug and release mode, analyzed with the "leaks" instrument. After several minutes of clicking around, not a single leak was found. (Using the head revision from the 'master' branch.)

Does anyone else have this problem?

Daniel

I just saw you're talking about the "allocations" tool. Beware that only the "Live Bytes" and "# Living" columns mean that memory is reserved; the other columns include temporary objects that have been created but released shortly after. Those are not leaks, just objects that are required for some internal things.

Is that what you meant?

aowenb

Ahh I see... yes that was the tool I was using. Thanks for looking into this 🙂

Daniel

You're welcome! I'm glad it was nothing serious! =)

aowenb

Thanks, oh one more thing...

we are using sparrow (an arc project) with our non-arc project. I just wanted to verify that if I call "SPTween tweenWithTarget" from our non-arc project and add the object to a juggler, then I need to call autorelease on it if I want it to be released after the juggler has finished animating it - is that the case?

Daniel

I don't think you need to do that, because ARC should insert an autorelease call in "tweenWithTarget" before returning the object -- just like any other factory method. You only have to call "release" when you called "alloc" yourself, which you don't do when you use "tweenWithTarget".

You can test it like this:

create the tween with "tweenWithTarget"
add it to the juggler
call "release" on the tween.

That should cause a crash a little later, if my theory is correct (because you'll have two release calls: one from the autorelease pool, one from the manual release call).

aowenb

Thanks again Daniel,

Yes that is correct... I was just concerned that the autorelease may not be inserted if the method is called from a non-ARC project... but thankfully that doesn't seem to be the case.