Symbolicating crash without crash log file - ios

It's not duplicate. My question is how to symbolicate crash error.
My live app is crashing and I've crash report in xCode and crashlytics but I don't have crashlog as it's happening on live app and it's random.
Is it possible to get some meaning out of crash report without a crash log?
How do we find out file & line number from such reports?
Here is one example of such crash
crash_info_entry_0
abort() called
crash_info_entry_1
myapp(569,0x16df57000) malloc: *** error for object 0x10404ddae: pointer being freed was not allocated

Symbolication is the process of translating addresses into symbols (functions, methods, etc). Without a crash log, which contains those addresses, symbolication doesn't make sense. You cannot translate addresses you do not have. But, where did the output you listed come from? It looks like it could be part of a larger log. You've tagged the issue Crashlytics - did this report come from their service?
There's some helpful information in the logging you've included. The good news is that it is telling you that you've got heap corruption. malloc has called abort because it's detected an inconsistency with its internal structures. Further, it's extremely unlikely that a symbolicated stack trace would help you, because heap corruption is rarely, if ever, caused by functions further up the stack.
Keep in mind that the crash you are seeing here is an effect. To fix this issue, you need a cause, and a stack trace isn't going to get you that in this situation.
There's more bad news. It is hard, and often even impossible, to reason about heap corruption. Replicating the bug can also be impossible, as memory corruption is typically not deterministic. As you've noted, the crash appears random. That's because it probably is.
What I would recommend doing here is using the various tools that Apple provides to help debug this kind of issue.
Look for other crashes that look heap-corruption-related
Try out Zombies in Instruments
Try malloc scribble, or guardmalloc, two other good memory debugging tools
It is extremely common for one heap-corrupting bug to cause lots of different kinds of crashes. This could be an objc over-release, so I'd also keep my eye out for selectorNotRecognized exceptions. Those crashes might give you more of a clue as to what kind of object is being over-released.
Good luck!

Related

Crashed: com.apple.root.utility-qos

Facing this strange issue where my app crashes after certain period of time. Attached is the screenshot from the Crashlytics as well.
This has occurred in an iPhone 6Plus running iOS 11.4.1.
I'd like to see a full crash log to get more information. With anything related to concurrency, I like to take a look at what all the threads are doing. Sometimes there is a clue in a thread that did not crash.
I do not know what's going on. But I can make an educated guess here that you are seeing heap corruption of some kind. The function "os_unfair_lock_corruption_abort" strongly indicates that the OS's primitive locking mechanism has detected a corrupted data structure, and is killing the processing.
Heap corruption is super-common, and can be extremely difficult to debug. One of the reasons is what you are seeing here is a symptom of the corruption, not the source. The source could be completely unrelated to locking/OperationQueue internals.
My suggestions would be to try out the memory debugging tools at your disposal, and attempt to fix all issues you can find. You might never be able to know which, if any, cause this. But, that's pretty much all you can do.
Check out malloc scribble, guardmalloc, and even NSZombies. All could potentially turn up some heap corruption bugs that are in your code.

EXC_BAD_ACCESS but NSZombies never triggered, how to debug?

We have some very random bugs happening and throwing EXC_BAD_ACCESS, or malloc_error_break, or abort. There is no consistency to the exceptions, and enabling NSZombies doesn't cause any zombies to be triggered ever.
In fact, running with zombies enabled causes the crashes never to occur. I believe there is a subtle memory error in this codebase, and after spending many hours cleaning up what could be minor issues, we still have not solved the issue.
It make sense that a bad pointer may be overwriting a piece of memory, which is then later dereferenced and crashes the app. But what are other ways to isolate the underlying issue?
We have used all the diagnostic memory tools which will run with the device attached as well (this application uses a peripheral, so cannot be fully debugged in the simulator).
NSZombie is just a mechanism to poison space used by objects instead of freeing them, similar to Address Sanitizer's Memory Poisoning. By using various instrumentation such as NSZombie or the above mentioned ASAN, your stack and heap allocation will be laid out differently, leading to undefined behavior in a condition where a crash would likely be the best case scenario.
EXC_BAD_ACCESS means you tried to access an invalid address or tried to read or write to a memory region you do not have such permissions for. The inconsistencies you're running into are likely consequences of a nasty stack or heap corruption, like sometimes overwriting a variable that just holds data and sometimes overwriting a pointer being used by the program.
Data layout matters a lot for what happens and heap layout is often randomized in non-debug builds which adds even more room for inconsistent crashes. In addition any changes to program source code or build settings may/will inevitably cause data layout changes.
I would recommend:
Build in debug mode (-g compiler flag) and run with debugger attached. When you get a crash, gdb or lldb (the latter being the default for Xcode tooling) will stop execution and let you do things, from there get a stack trace using bt and that may let you work out the deeper cause of the problem.
Use ASAN, this page explains about its usage within Xcode tooling. It's generally an excellent tool for dealing with memory issues. Beware that using it with shared libraries built without support for it may cause anomalies but it usually tells you of them and generally tries to hold your hand as much as it can.
"printf debugging" can help, something like #define TRACE printf("%s %s:%d\n", __func__, __FILE__, __LINE__); and scattering these across the likely problem point can actually be helpful.
In general, I would suggest using a debugger first, without NSZombie or anything, just do a bunch of runs to a point of a crash and get stack traces, register states etc. Having those samples across multiple crashes can help you narrow down the problem.

What can cause "Message from debugger: Terminated due to memory issue"

My app is sometimes crashing and the console says
Message from debugger: Terminated due to memory issue
Has anyone else experienced this and know some of what can cause this? Here is what I have tried so far.
I have enabled Zombie Objects and it does not find anything.
This only happens on my iPhone and so I can't run the other Memory Management tools that only run on the simulator (ie Guard Malloc).
This only happens after a low memory warning. It doesn't happen after every memory warning, just after some memory warnings. When my app receives a memory warning, it clears out a number of caches and so my guess is that it is related to this.
In the simulator I simulated memory warnings and this never happened.
I thought that it might be related to a weak object so I added a symbolic break point on objc_weak_error. I did get the debugger to stop one this break point once and I fixed the weak error, but it did not fix the "Terminated due to memory issue".
I though that maybe I wasn't freeing up enough memory, so I watched the total memory used by my app in Xcode and it never went over 50% of available memory.
My app is a mixture of Objective-C and Swift code. It appears that this is coming from areas of my app that are written in Objective-C, but I am not 100% sure.
I would love to know if anyone else has experienced this issue and if so what you did to fix it. I have looked at the other Stack Overlow issues on this and so far none of them have given me any extra insight to this problem.
So one of my initial observations was wrong. I thought that my app never went above 50% of available memory (point 6 above). I was wrong. It did use up more memory and this error is coming because I did not release enough memory during the memory warning.

Using instruments to find memory leaks

I've tried to read almost every decent tutorial in the internet, but still can't understand what is really happening here:
I've "Hide System Libraries" and "Invert the call tree", but I do not understand how to find actual code responsible for for example this leak. Any tips are appreciated. May be I am missing something obvious. I am getting hundreds of leaks, however I am using weak in closures, I do not have classes referencing each other etc. But it looks like I am missing something fundamental.
The problem shown in your screenshot is Instruments can't find your app's debug symbols. Instruments is showing memory addresses instead of function names. You are not going to be able to find the source of your memory leaks in Instruments without function names, even if you invert the call tree and hide system libraries.
Make sure your project is generating debug symbols. Check that the Generate Debug Symbols build setting is set to Yes. If your project is generating debug symbols, Instruments may be unable to find the dSYM file that contains the debug symbols. In Instruments choose Instrument > Call Tree > Locate dSYM. The dSYM is usually in the same directory as the release version's application bundle. The following article has additional information:
Instruments: Locating dSYM Files
Memory leaks can be difficult to track down. This is likely going to be a time consuming process, so be prepared. In the end, there is usually a lot of trial and error with debugging memory leaks. The "Memory Leaks" instrument has actually only detected one leak for me in the past. I've always had to track them down myself using the "Allocations" instrument.
One of the things that has helped me in the past is to start by trying to figure out what objects are actually being leaked. Click on the allocations instrument (the row above "Leak Checks"). Now try sorting by number of objects released or amount of memory used. See if there are any objects that have a count of 0 released when they shouldn't be sticking around. See if there is an object type that is taking an abnormal amount of memory.
Memory leaks are always due to developer mistakes with memory management. There are some minor memory leaks that exist in some of the lower level private APIs in Foundation and UIKit. At those lower levels, they are dealing with a lot more manual memory management, so its much easier to make tiny mistakes. You can't really do anything about those, but they are relatively rare.
If your application is working just fine, you may not need to worry about fixing these. There is some cost benefit analysis you want to do here. If this isn't impacting performance or stability, is the time investment in fixing these right now worth the minor benefits it will provide you and your users?
However it is worth nothing that memory leaks can add up, so if a user has your app open for a long time, the amount of leaked memory will eventually become a problem if you continue to leak more objects over time. At some point the application will crash and the user will have to re-open. But if your memory leaks are small enough that this doesn't become an issue unless the app has been open for HOURS, is it really that much of a problem anyways? That's always a judgment call on your part.

app works fine on iPad 2, crashes on iPad 3, with low memory warning

as the title says, I have an app which works on iPad 2, but crashes on iPad 3. when running it the console gives me a low memory warning message. When the crash happens I symbolicate it, but there's really nothing that I can relate to the code, like it shows
process name, UUID, rpages, recent_max, [reason] (state)
and under those column headers just hexadecimal stuff, nothing showing method calls or lines in the project.
Any ideas? am I missing some flags in the code that allows for a better crash log?
Thanks.
If you're getting low memory warnings and fail to release enough memory to resolve the issue, your app will almost certainly crash. The thing is, I don't think that the particulars of how or why it crashed can possibly be illuminating. At that point, you're evaluating secondary symptoms. You really need to go back and figure out why you got the low memory warning in the first place and fix that problem.
As Daniel said, you can look at Technical Note 2151, but as it says:
When you see a low memory crash, rather than be concerned about what part of your code was executing at the time of termination, you should investigate your memory usage patterns and your responses to low memory warnings. Memory Allocations Help lists detailed steps on how to use the Leaks Instrument to discover memory leaks, and how to use the Allocations Instrument's Mark Heap feature to avoid abandoned memory. Memory Usage Performance Guidelines discusses the proper ways to respond to low-memory notifications as well as many tips for using memory effectively. It is also recommended that you check out the WWDC 2010 session, Advanced Memory Analysis with Instruments.
So, a couple of thoughts:
Have you looked for leaks? The Finding Leaks article walks you through how to use instruments to find your leaks.
If you turned on zombies, have you turned them off? Zombies is a great diagnostic tool, but just consumes memory.
Have you run your code through the static analyzer (shift+command+B or select "Analyze" on the "Product" menu)? Especially if using non-ARC code, this can find lots of memory issues.
Have you examined your allocations for unexplained increases without offsetting decreases with the Instrument's Allocations tool. Using that, you can run the program, look at the consumption of memory on the graph and see if you see any increases that aren't offset at some point by the corresponding decreases. And if so, highlight those increases in the graph:
For example, when running the Allocations tool, hold down the option key and then click-and-drag with your mouse to highlight a portion of the timeline, to identify what you want to inspect. You probably want to focus on one of your spikes in allocations. For example, I found a bump in my allocations and highlighted it as such (this was a ludicrously simple example where I create a huge array in viewDidLoad, but hopefully it give you the idea):
Note, I find it useful to show the call tree in the lower panel, it's often useful to select "Hide System Libraries", to focus on your code (and "Invert Call Tree", too). And if you double click on the method name in Instruments (in my example, here, it would be viewDidLoad), Instruments will then show you your code that's doing the allocation:
Low memory warnings generate a different kind of log than standard crashes. Take a look at the "Understanding Low Memory Reports" section of this article to understand what happened with your application and how you can debug it using Instruments: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#technotes/tn2151/_index.html

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