I get frequent memory warnings in my application but I don't know why.
Here is the snapshot of allocation instruments.
I know that we don't have any control over virtual memory assigned to us but I am trying to understand what information does that number 26.50 MB means for a developer.
1. What does a high VM means ? Does it lead to a jetsam ? Is that cause of any other concern ?
2. Is this value dependent on device ?
3. Does a low vm means that your app is memory efficient
4. Does a high VM leads to memory warnings in your app ?
5. What cause this value to change ?
6. What steps should a developer take when they see a high vm for their app (like 300 MB) ?
7. Is VM tracker instrument related to this value ?
Anonymous VM covers a lot of things, some of which are things you want to minimize and some that are generally less important. The short version of "anonymous VM" is that it's addresses you have mapped but not named. Heap allocations get "named" which lets you track them as objects. But there are lots (and lots) of non-objecty things that fall into the "anonymous VM" bucket.
Things allocated with malloc can wind up in this region. But also memory mapped files. Your executable is a memory mapped file, but since it's never dirty, parts of it can be swapped out. So "it's complicated." But in big, vague terms, yes, you do care about this section, but you may not care about all of it very much. Heap allocations tends to track your ObjC stuff. Anonymous VM often tracks things that you don't have a lot of direct control over (like CALayer backing storage).
All that said, the Instruments output you provide doesn't look like any major problem. I suspect it's not indicative of a time you're pressuring memory. You'll need to get yourself into a memory warning situation and see what's going on then, and dig into the specifics of what is using memory.
For much more detail on this, you should watch WWDC 2013 session 704 "Building Efficient OS X Apps" which goes into depth on much of this. While iOS has a somewhat different memory system, and some OS X tools aren't available on iOS, many of the concepts still apply.
I recently ported a project over to ARC as I was having trouble with crashes and actually determining the cause, whether it was leaks or retain cycles etc., Now I have ported it over, I have not done massive testing to see whether it still crashes as I have not managed to get passed the activity monitor giving me the heeby jeebies when it shows my application doing This (activity monitor profiler)
whereas in allocations tools it looks something like
That real memory usage is not even the worst of it, at one point it shot up to around 90 odd MBs, I am unsure on how to proceed as I am not 100 percent sure what to do with the information given here, Except assume that I might be dong something, very wrong, And I have also run the leaks instrument, I have a few but they are minimal, they are all in bytes.
Does anyone have an explanation? or at the very least are able to clarify what I am possibly looking at? what's the difference between real memory usage and live bytes and overall bytes? Also these results were gotten doing exactly the same actions once and then showing you at the end of it.
I have been trying to reduce the real memory usage as pre ARC conversion I was having memory warnings and silent crashes frequently, I have not run into these again after converting, but I have not done any prolonged testing as I cannot conceive of even trying when the real memory usage looks like that. Which actually looks a lot higher than before ARC...Although the live bytes does look lower post ARC...Madness!
Something that confused me for a while is that ARC - wonderful as it is - does not necessarily avoid the need for #autoreleasepool.
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/MemoryMgmt/Articles/mmAutoreleasePools.html
I ran very large memory usage in an app until someone suggested:
#autoreleasepool {
// lots of allocating of objects returned from methods then discarded
} // and the closing brace of the autoreleasepool block causes their memory to be recovered here
Maybe that will help you.
A good explanation of the meaning of the various columns in the profiler is at Instruments ObjectAlloc: Explanation of Live Bytes & Overall Bytes
I am having some trouble around memory leaks in my app.
I just wanted to know that whether it is possible to identify how much memory allocated by my app on heap so that i can reduce my resources accordingly.
I know that system gives low memory warnings & i can clean up my data there but even if sometimes it wont happen.
If i get to know that my app is reaching maximum memory & remaining size on heap so i could be better to reduce my resources.
Thanks in advance....
Use Instruments. Command-I in XCode to profile your app in Instruments.
Yes of course, I would recommend the instrument's tool "Leaks". It lets you know how much memory allocates your app, and if there are leaks it tells you what they are, when and were it was allocated (and obviously not released).
Here is a nice guide I used some time ago.
http://www.cimgf.com/2008/04/02/cocoa-tutorial-fixing-memory-leaks-with-instruments/
I am trying to work through some low memory conditions using instruments. I can watch memory consumption in the Physical Memory Free monitor drop down to a couple of MB, even though Allocations shows that All Allocations is about 3 MB and Overall Bytes is 34 MB.
I have started to experience crashing since I moved some operations to a separate thread with an NSOperationQueue. But I wasn't using instruments before the change. Nevertheless, I'm betting I did something that I can undo to stop the crashes.
By the way, it is much more stable without instruments or the debugger connected.
I have the leaks down to almost none (maybe a hundred bytes max before a crash).
When I look at Allocations, I only see very primitive objects. And the total memory reported by it is also very low. So I cant see how my app is causing these low memory warnings.
When I look at Heap Shots from the start up, I don't see more than about 3 MB there, between the baseline and the sum of all the heap growth values.
What should I be looking at to find where the problem is? Can I isolate it to one of my view controller instances, for example? Or to one of my other instances?
What I have done:
I powered the device off and back on, and this made a significant improvement. Instruments is not reporting a low memory warning. Also, I noticed that Physical Free Memory at start up was only about 7 MB before restarting, and its about 60 MB after restarting.
However, I am seeing a very regular (periodic) drop in Physical Free Memory, dropping from 43 MB to 6 MB (an then back up to 43 MB). I would like to knwo what it causing that. I don't have any timers running in this app. (I do have some performSelector:afterDelay:, but those aren't active during these tests.)
I am not using ARC.
The allocations and the leaks instruments only show what the objects actually take, but not what their underlaying non-object structures (the backing stores) are taking. For example, for UIImages it will show you have a few allocated bytes. This is because a UIImage object only takes those bytes, but the CGImageRef that actually contains the image data is not an object, and it is not taken into account in these instruments.
If you are not doing it already, try running the VM Tracker at the same time you run the allocations instrument. It will give you an idea of the type memory that is being allocated. For iOS the "Dirty Memory", shown by this instrument, is what normally triggers the memory warnings. Dirty memory is memory that cannot be automatically discarded by the VM system. If you see lots of CGImages, images might be your problem.
Another important concept is abandoned memory. This is memory that was allocated, it is still referenced somewhere (and as such not a leak), but not used. An example of this type of memory is a cache of some sort, which is not freeing up upon memory warning. A way to find this out is to use the heap shot analysis. Press the "Mark Heap" button of the allocations instrument, do some operation, return to the previous point in the app and press "Mark Heap" again. The second heap shot should show you what new objects have been allocated between those two moments, and might shed some light on the mystery. You could also repeat the operation simulating a memory warning to see if that behaviour changes.
Finally, I recommend you to read this article, which explains how all this works: http://liam.flookes.com/wp/2012/05/03/finding-ios-memory/.
The difference between physical memory from VM Tracker and allocated memory from "Allocations" is due to the major differences of how these instruments work:
Allocations traces what your app does by installing a tap in the functions that allocate memory (malloc, NSAllocateObject, ...). This method yields very precise information about each allocation, like position in code (stack), amount, time, type. The downside is that if you don't trace every function (like vm_allocate) that somehow allocates memory, you lose this information.
VM Tracker samples the state of the system's virtual memory in regular intervals. This is a much less precise method, as it just gives you an overall view of the current state. It operates at a low frequency (usually something like every three seconds) and you get no idea of how this state was reached.
A known culprit of invisible allocations is CoreGraphics: It uses a lot of memory when decompressing images, drawing bitmap contexts and the like. This memory is usually invisible in the Allocations instrument. So if your app handles a lot of images it is likely that you see a big difference between the amount of physical memory and the overall allocated size.
Spikes in physical memory might result from big images being decompressed, downsized and then only used in screen resolution in some view's or layer's contents. All this might happen automatically in UIKit without your code being involved.
I have the leaks down to almost none (maybe a hundred bytes max before a crash).
In my experience, also very small leaks are "dangerous" sign. In fact, I have never seen a leak larger than 4K, and leaks I usually see are a couple hundreds of bytes. Still, they usually "hide" behind themselves a much larger memory which is lost.
So, my first suggestion is: get rid of those leaks, even though they seem small and insignificant -- they are not.
I have started to experience crashing since I moved some operations to a separate thread with an NSOperationQueue.
Is there a chance that the operation you moved to the thread is the responsible for the pulsing peak? Could it be spawned more than once at a time?
As to the peaks, I see two ways you can go about them:
use the Time Profiler in Instruments and try to understand what code is executing while you see the peak rising;
selectively comment out portions of your code (I mean: entire parts of your app -- e.g., replace a "real" controller with a basic/empty UIViewController, etc) and see if you can identify the culprit this way.
I have never seen such a pulsating behaviour, so I assume it depends on your app or on your device. Have you tried with a different device? What happens in the simulator (do you see the peak)?
When I'm reading your text, I have the impression that you might have some hidden leaks. I could be wrong but, are you 100% sure that you have check all leaks?
I remember one particular project I was doing few month ago, I had the same kind of issue, and no leaks in Instruments. My memory kept growing up and I get memory warnings... I start to log on some important dealloc method. And I've seen that some objects, subviews (UIView) were "leaking". But they were not seen by Instruments because they were still attached to a main view.
Hope this was helpful.
In the Allocations Instrument make sure you have "Only Track Active Allocations" checked. See Image Below. I think this makes it easier to see what is actually happening.
Have you run Analyze on the project? If there's any analyze warnings, fix them first.
Are you using any CoreFoundation stuff? Some of the CF methods have ... strange ... interactions with the ObjC runtime and mem management (they shouldn't do, AFAICS, but I've seen some odd behaviour with the low-level image and AV manipulations where it seems like mem is being used outside the core app process - maybe the OS calls being used by Apple?)
... NB: there have also, in previous versions of iOS, been a few mem-leaks inside Apple's CF methods. IIRC the last of those was fixed in iOS 5.0.
(StackOVerflow's parser sucks: I typed "3" not "1") Are you doing something with a large number of / large-sized CALayer instances (or UIView's with CG* methods, e.g. a custom drawRect method in a UIView?)
... NB: I have seen the exact behaviour you describe caused by 2 and 3 above, either in the CF libraries, or in the Apple windowing system when it tries to work with image data that was originally generated inside CF libraries - or which found its way into CALayers.
It seems that Instruments DOES NOT CORRECTLY TRACK memory usage inside the CA / CG system; this area is a bit complex since Apple is shuffling back and forth between CPU and GPU ram, but it's disappointing that the mem usage seems to simply "disappear" when it clearly is still being used!
Final thought (4. -- but SO won't let me type that) - are you using the invisible RHS of Instruments?
Apple hardcoded Instruments to always disable itself everytime you run it (so you have to keep manually opening it). This is stupid, since some of the core information only exists in the RHS bar. But I've worked with several people who didn't even know it existed :)
I have code that has a low amount of active allocations (about 5 MB according to Instruments), but a high amount of system memory usage (over 100 MB). I know the code is leak-free, and I'm not seeing any allocation spikes after some optimization, but I'm still crashing due to the high amount of memory usage.
I Googled around a lot and see that I'm supposed to be using the VM Tracker instrument, which confirms my high memory usage, but I'm not sure how to address this situation. I'm using as little memory as possible, it's still too much on an iPad 1, and I don't have the knowledge or tools to figure out how to get the OS to not mark so much memory as dirty when I'm not actually using it. Where do I go from here?
Use the Profile tool and select memory +allocations. Click the VM tracker and take a snapshots. This results in a list with resident dirty and virtual memory usage per object type. This will give you an indication where to look.
I think the most common problem is that you have a lot of autoreleased objects that reside in the autoreleasepool. The following link explains more on how to handle autoreleasepools:
How does the NSAutoreleasePool autorelease pool work?