Anonymous Listener of volley request causing memory leak

Question

I am using volley library for making web-services call. I made a general class for making all web services call and making service call from there and made anonymous listene

Answer 1

I know I m a bit late to join the party, but few days back this problem did spoil my weekend. In order to figure out, I went on to research a bit which finally got the solution.

The issue lies in the last request object getting leaked in Network Dispatcher & Cache Dispatcher.

@Override
    public void run() {
        if (DEBUG) VolleyLog.v("start new dispatcher");
        Process.setThreadPriority(Process.THREAD_PRIORITY_BACKGROUND);

        // Make a blocking call to initialize the cache.
        mCache.initialize();

        Request request;
        while (true) {
            // release previous request object to avoid leaking request object when mQueue is drained.
            request = null;
            try {
                // Take a request from the queue.
                request = mCacheQueue.take();
            } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                // We may have been interrupted because it was time to quit.
                if (mQuit) {
                    return;
                }
                continue;
            }
            try {
                request.addMarker("cache-queue-take");

                // If the request has been canceled, don't bother dispatching it.
                if (request.isCanceled()) {
                    request.finish("cache-discard-canceled");
                    continue;
                }

                // Attempt to retrieve this item from cache.
                Cache.Entry entry = mCache.get(request.getCacheKey());
                if (entry == null) {
                    request.addMarker("cache-miss");
                    // Cache miss; send off to the network dispatcher.
                    mNetworkQueue.put(request);
                    continue;
                }

                // If it is completely expired, just send it to the network.
                if (entry.isExpired()) {
                    request.addMarker("cache-hit-expired");
                    request.setCacheEntry(entry);
                    mNetworkQueue.put(request);
                    continue;
                }

                // We have a cache hit; parse its data for delivery back to the request.
                request.addMarker("cache-hit");
                Response response = request.parseNetworkResponse(
                        new NetworkResponse(entry.data, entry.responseHeaders));
                request.addMarker("cache-hit-parsed");

                if (!entry.refreshNeeded()) {
                    // Completely unexpired cache hit. Just deliver the response.
                    mDelivery.postResponse(request, response);
                } else {
                    // Soft-expired cache hit. We can deliver the cached response,
                    // but we need to also send the request to the network for
                    // refreshing.
                    request.addMarker("cache-hit-refresh-needed");
                    request.setCacheEntry(entry);

                    // Mark the response as intermediate.
                    response.intermediate = true;

                    // Post the intermediate response back to the user and have
                    // the delivery then forward the request along to the network.
                    final Request finalRequest = request;
                    mDelivery.postResponse(request, response, new Runnable() {
                        @Override
                        public void run() {
                            try {
                                mNetworkQueue.put(finalRequest);
                            } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                                // Not much we can do about this.
                            }
                        }
                    });
                }
            } catch (Exception e) {
                VolleyLog.e(e, "Unhandled exception %s", e.toString());
            }
        }

As you can see a new request object is created before it takes from the queue. This overcomes the problem of memory leak.

P.S: Don't use Volley from the Google repository as it is deprecated and has this bug since then. In order to use Volley, go for this :

https://github.com/mcxiaoke/android-volley

The above repository is free from any memory leaks whatsoever. Ciao.