Once I enable Zombies, how do I hunt them down?

Question

Continuing some helpful StackOverflow debugging, I have a zombie I need to track down:

2010-08-22 10:18:51.111 AppName[106:307] *** -[CFString release]: message sent to deallocated instance 0x19f3b0

How would one find the variable name or whathaveyou for the 0x19f3b0 Zombie?

Answer 1

Generally the way I do this is to hunt down the memory reference in the Object allocations instruments tool. It's tedious, but you can usually narrow it down to a few data types, of which usually only one will make sense in your context.

Of course, I only do this if I can't get good info out of the debugger.

Answer 2

Run the Allocations instrument, and enable "NSZombie Detection" and also turn on "track release/retain". Then as you are running, when the zombie is encountered, it pops up an alert and lets you drill down to explore what code released and retained the original object.