weak-references

I am a little confused about block usage in Objective-C. I currently use ARC and I have quite a lot of blocks in my app, currently always referring to self instead of its weak reference. May that be the cause of these blocks retaining self and keeping it from being dealloced ? The question is, should I always use a weak reference of self in a block ? -(void)handleNewerData:(NSArray *)arr { ProcessOperation *operation = [[ProcessOperation alloc] initWithDataToProcess:arr completion:^(NSMutableArray *rows) { dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{ [self updateFeed:arr rows:rows]; }); }];

The use of weak references is something that I've never seen an implementation of so I'm trying to figure out what the use case for them is and how the implementation would work. When have you needed to use a WeakHashMap or WeakReference and how was it used? One problem with strong references is caching, particular with very large structures like images. Suppose you have an application which has to work with user-supplied images, like the web site design tool I work on. Naturally you want to cache these images, because loading them from disk is very expensive and you want to avoid the