iPhone Distribution Build Out of memory failure?

Question

I keep getting an out of memory failure when I try to do the distribution build of my app. The app only gets up to a max of 12 megs of real memory when testing it in Instruments. Why is this happening? My app folder is only 18 megs without the build folder in it. Turns to 80 megs with the build folder. But this doesn't seem like a lot compared to other big apps I've seen in the app store. Any ideas?

Answer 1

The size of the application on disk and the amount of memory required by the application when it is running are two different values. The failure you are seeing is relating to the second measurement, not the first. 12MB of memory consumed sounds like quite a bit. While this value is small for the Simulator being run on a machine with gigabytes of available memory (and an on-disk VM system), on the device where 256MB total memory is available it is a much bigger deal. In my experience I've found about 8MB to be an upper limit in memory consumption before things start going south (YMMV).

Is your application responding correctly to low memory warnings? Your app will be notified by the OS when things start to get hairy- not responding to the warnings appropriately can result in your application being preemptively terminated.