In CocoaTouch (iPhone OS) how do I find/eliminate leaks that the Instruments Leak tool doesn't find?

Question

I have an iPhone app that is running great in the simulator. It responds well to the memory warnings by getting rid of everything that is not absolutely essential. When I

Answer 1

One thing to look for is circular references.

(I don't want this to sound patronising - just want to make sure I'm being clear:) If object a refers to object b and object b refers to object a, there may not be a reported "leak" because all the memory is still referenced - but this may be an orphaned island of objects, seperated from your app and never reclaimable. Of course it may involve more objects ( a refers to b, b refers to c, c refers to a, etc).

If you're building up a graph of objects somewhere, and there are any back or cross references, be sure to break the circles if you release the root (there are different ways of doing this. The simplest is probably to make sure each class in question has a releaseAll method, or similar - which calls releaseAll on it's child objects, then releases the child objects - but this isn't always the best solution).