UIImageView+AFNetworking Memory leak from cg raster data - ios

Question

I am using AFNetworking 3.0's UIImageView+AFNetworking to display images in a UICollectionView.
However as I keep scrolling, the memory usage of my app keeps growing forever. I used Instruments Allocations tool and am able to narrow down the issue to CG Raster Data which keeps growing for every image which is loaded. Looking at the details of the CG Raster Data, The responsible caller is cgdataprovidercreatewithcopyofdata and responsible library is CoreGraphics. For each cell loaded, a 240 KB memory is wasted.
There are a lot of similar issues on stack overflow but none really help/have a solution.
I thought this might be due to cache, so I enabled following but didn't help at all:
NSURLCache * sharedCache = [[NSURLCache alloc] initWithMemoryCapacity:0 diskCapacity:10 * 1024 diskPath:nil];
[NSURLCache setSharedURLCache:sharedCache];
I tried wrapping the setImageWithURLRequest inside an autoreleasepool but didn't help.
I tried searching for cgdataprovidercreatewithcopyofdata in the entire app but I find no hits in my app or the afnetworking. However if I remove the loading of the image, then I don't see this issue.
Also if I remove the setting of the image inside the completion handler, the memory still grows. Meaning that setImageWithURLRequest itself is the culprit and not the setting of the image inside the completion handler.
I have been struggling with this for a while, any help would be appreciated!
Here's my code for the setting of image:
[cell.thumbnail cancelImageDownloadTask];
__weak UIImageView *weakImageView = cell.thumbnail;
#autoreleasepool {
[cell.thumbnail setImageWithURLRequest:[NSURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:#"http://myurl/image.png"]]
placeholderImage:[UIImage imageNamed:#"placeholder.png"]
success:^(NSURLRequest *request, NSHTTPURLResponse *response, UIImage *image) {
UIImageView *strongImageView = weakImageView; // make local strong reference to protect against race conditions
if (!strongImageView) return;
[UIView transitionWithView:strongImageView
duration:0.3
options:UIViewAnimationOptionTransitionCrossDissolve
animations:^{
strongImageView.image = image;
}
completion:NULL];
}
failure:NULL];
Here's screenshots from instruments:

Answer 1

I used #ajay gabani response to use SDWebImage instead of AFNetworking's ImageView.
In SDWebImage it at least provided a way to clear the cache plus you can control whether the image is cached in disk or only memory.
I set the maxMemoryCountLimit to 10 but it doesn't seem to do much in my testing:
SDImageCache *imageCache = [SDImageCache sharedImageCache];
imageCache.maxMemoryCountLimit=10;
I clear the cache every few seconds:
[NSTimer scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval:5.0 target:self selector:#selector(simulateMemoryWarning) userInfo:nil repeats:YES];
- (void)simulateMemoryWarning{
[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] postNotificationName:UIApplicationDidReceiveMemoryWarningNotification object:nil];
SDImageCache *imageCache = [SDImageCache sharedImageCache];
NSLog(#"Simulated");
[imageCache clearMemory];
[imageCache clearDisk];
}