SceneKit: too much memory persisting

Question

I’m out of ideas here, SceneKit is piling on the memory and I’m only getting started. I’m displaying SNCNodes which are stored in arrays so I can separate compo

Answer 1

I did also experience a lot of memory bloat from SceneKit in my app, with similar memory chunks as you in Instruments (C3DGenericSourceCreateDeserializedDataWithAccessors, C3DMeshSourceCreateMutable, etc). I found that setting the geometry property to nil on the SCNNode objects before letting Swift deinitialize them solved it.

In your case, in you cleanup function, do something like:

atomsNode_1.removeFromParentNode()
atomsNode_1.geometry = nil
atomsNode_2.removeFromParentNode()
atomsNode_2.geometry = nil

Another example of how you may implement the cleaning:

class ViewController: UIViewController {
    @IBOutlet weak var sceneView: SCNView!
    var scene: SCNScene!

    // ...

    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()
        scene = SCNScene()
        sceneView.scene = scene

        // ...
    }

    deinit {
        scene.rootNode.cleanup()
    }

    // ...
}

extension SCNNode {
    func cleanup() {
        for child in childNodes {
            child.cleanup()
        }
        geometry = nil
    }
}

If that doesn't work, you may have better success by setting its texture to nil, as reported on scene kit memory management using swift.