What is the best way of solving memory leaks on the iphone ?

Question

Please suggest the best way of solving memory leaks on the iphone. What is the best use of release, autorelease, retain and which cases do each apply?

Answer 1

You can track memory leaks with Instruments: see this tutorial.

If you're familiar with Valgrind, you use it on x86 binaries built against the iPhone Simulator SDK: see how Landon Fuller does it.

EDIT: Another Stackoverflow answer suggests the Clang analyser: static analysis of the code may detect memory allocation errors as well. I never used this tool myself but it's good to know it's possible.

Answer 2

There's Apple's Instruments.app in your /Developer/Applications folder, which is intended to test appplications for leaks and other errors.

I believe you will find a good tutorial.

Answer 3

This is a very broad question. I'd start with Apple's Memory Management Programming Guide for Cocoa.

There are many questions here which point to various memory management resources. These include

• Memory Management in Objective-C
• Understanding reference counting with Cocoa / Objective C
• iPhone Development - Lessons in memory management
• Memory leak detection tools in XCode
• How do you detect memory leaks on iPhone?
• IPHONE: Analyzing leaks with instruments
• iPhone development - preventing leaks
• In CocoaTouch (iPhone OS) how do I find/eliminate leaks that the Instruments Leak tool doesn’t find?