Memory warning and crash (ARC) - how to identify why it's happening?

Question

I\'ve started to use the ARC recently and since then I blame it for every single memory problem. :) Perhaps, you could help me better understand what I\'m doing wrong.

Answer 1

This is not an answer to your question but I was trying to solve similar problems long before ARC was introduced. Recently I was working on an application that was caching images in memory and releasing them all after receiving memory warning. This worked fine as long as I was using the application at a normal speed (no crazy tapping). But when I started to generate a lot of events and many images started to load, the application did not manage to get the memory warning and it was crashing.

I once wrote a test application that was creating many autoreleased objects after tapping a button. I was able to tap faster (and create objects) than the OS managed to release the memory. The memory was slowly increasing so after a significant time or simply using bigger objects I would surely crash the application and cause device to reboot (looks really effective ;)). I checked that using Instruments which unfortunately affected the test and made everything slower but I suppose this is true also when not using Instruments.

On the other occasion I was working on a bigger project that is quite complex and has a lot of UI created from code. It also has a lot of string processing and nobody cared to use release - there were few thousands of autorelease calls when I checked last time. So after 5 minutes of slightly extensive usage of this application, it was crashing and rebooting the device.

If I'm correct then the OS/logic that is responsible for actually deallocating memory is not fast enough or has not high enough priority to save an application from crashing when a lot of memory operations are performed. I never confirmed these suspicions and I don't know how to solve this problem other than simply reducing allocated memory.