I have a problem right now. I develop game application for iPad with cocos2d. In my application, I use background music. When I use cocos2d music method SimpleAudioEngine, i got leak. However, my bos don't want have a leak in our application. Any other way to play background music except using SimpleAudioEngine and not get a leak?
Thanx before. Regards.
How do you know that you have a leak? Often times what is reported as a leak truly isn't a leak, or a leak in your own code. In particular the static analyzer only makes suggestions but is quite often wrong about his assumptions.
You may also want to contact the library author Steve Oldmeadow, he can be found on the cocos2d forum. At least he may be able to confirm a bug, or explain why it's not a leak.
Secondly, I wouldn't put too much weight on the leaks. Let's assume you're leaking 16 Bytes every time you start a music. You would have to start the music 16.000 times to have leaked 16 KB. How likely is this in your app, and how badly do you "need" those 16 KB?
Third, tell your boss you fixed the leak. If he doesn't want leaks in the app, he's obviously not a (good) programmer. I know it's a lie, and I know there's going to be programmers who'll hate me. But really before you spend hours or even days to find a "better" way of playing music (possibly with other side effects) rather than using what's tried and true in hundreds of iPhone apps, such a white lie is going to save your boss a bunch of money.
I think that too many people think that leaking memory equals an app that crashes often. Such is not the case, unless the leaks are significant, resulting in out of memory errors or in some scenarios memory fragmentation.
You can use SoundMaster engine instead of CocosDension Sound Engine. ARC support, memory management (NO LEAKS) and many other features like fade in/out, relative volumes for effects or cross-fades.
Related
I am playing around with Instruments. And I just recorded/profiled for memory leaks, I had very few memory leaks, but an overwhelming amount of allocations just keep going even when my app just opened. Here is a screenshot after using the app for less than 10 seconds.
And as I keep using the app it just keeps increasing and increasing.
The weirdest part is most of the allocations are coming from classes I don't know like:
Foundation
Altitude
lbdispatch.dylib
But it could be from the SBJson and the other classes I imported and added for JSon and XML.
But is this a lot of memory allocations? Is too much bad???
Yes and no, it depends on what you are doing, if you allocate for example a lot of strings, lets say you allocate 1000 strings these allocation perse are not bad, but it depends on your logic view of your application, if you really need all the strings at once and you need them to be allocated and alive through all the steps of your application, then you dont have anything to do, your application just needs alot of memory,
However on the other hand, you may find some other ways to logically structure your application, like for example you could only allocate each of the 1000 string once you need it.
A very abstract answer is, if your app requires a lot of memory and there is no way to use some techniques such as lazy loading, or caching, then you dont have any other solution
But if you can restructure your application to use lazy loading, caching, allocation pools it would bee better
Please note: that you could let iOS sdk help you, by implementing correctly the memory warning callbacks in your application, in such a way that whenever you receive a warning, you start releasing any resource that you dont currently need
Also, do you have Zombies on? Zombies default to not actually removing any allocations, so memory is never deallocated. Always test for memory leaks with Zombies off.
I'm trying to debug a mysterious app crash that happens after running the app for a few hours.
My hunch is that this may be memory related, as I've not done any memory optimization since starting to build my app.
I'm looking at my application with the "allocations" instrument and I see these numbers:
All allocations 4.70mb
Living 51072
Transitory 357280
Overall Bytes 100.23mb
Overall 408000
Which is the important number here? Does my app take 4.7 Mb of memory or 100 Mb? At which point should I be concerned about my app being killed for memory reasons? I want to avoid premature optimization :)
Since I'm using ARC and TabBarController, most of the controller related memory seems to be out of my hands, unless I find out how to create a tab and lazily init a controller when that tab is first touched.
Thank you!
Hey, im running cocos2d, box2d and several particle systems on the iPhone 4.
I've completed my first level which has numerous sprites allocated as well.
I have set my FPS limit to 30fps.
When the game first runs, it runs well, at a solid 30fps. This continues for about 3-4 minutes of smooth gameplay.
But after a while the fps starts to drop, and it turns into a gradual decline until it hits around the 12fps mark.
I remember I had this problem with a previous game that I abandoned.
Is this caused by a memory leak, possibly from not deallocating items??
In my (void)dealloc methods, I am inputting all my allocated releases, could I have missed one? Or is there some other possibility i'm not considering?
Thanks!
Sounds like you're running out of resources. I'd try Instruments as suggested by SB. Instruments can check for leaks using the Allocation instrument. You could also try the OpenGL profiling suite.
I have the same problem and I cannot get the resolution. When I unload the entire scene and reload it again, everything is back to normal. So it definitely seems to be a leak somewhere, but even with instruments I cannot find the source of it.
The total memory usage is not growing, no leaks reported, so I have the feeling that something in Cocos2d or in Chipmunk increasing the load.
I am using sprites which are moving in and out from the screen in a random manner and creating nd destroying them every time. Can it be that something is not released properly and Cocos or Chipmunk is still calculating with those items?
I'm having strange effects with my app. I implemented my own PDF viewer. It shows ONE page at a time. Using Instruments Activity Monitor I see that my real memory is constantly at around 50MB.
After switching pages forth and back a couple of times I receive a memory warning level 0.
I do my best to react on it and sacrifice the low-res background image I'm rendering first to show something until CATiledLayer catches up.
Does not help. A few pages later I get memory warning level 1 and level 2 and after a few more pages my app gets killed with reason "9". Memory NEVER goes above 50MB!
Why do I get those warnings in the first place? There IS enough memory available.
This is happening on on iPad running iOS 4.3.
I don't think there's anything mysterious going on here -- which I'm sure is not what you wanted to hear. There are no absolute figures of "safe" amounts of memory to use. The rule is: when the OS tells you you're using too much, use less. It will jettison background processes first and in preference to your foreground app but there are still limits.
In the "olden days," you used to be lucky to get 20Mb. I'm sure you can safely get more than that on an iPad but, apparently, it's less than 50Mb.
You don't say how much memory you free by releasing the background image, but it seems that you need to be caching less data. You might also want to check Leaks (also in Instruments) to make sure you're releasing the objects you think you are.
i have see this article about retrieve memory usage off iphone app
programmatically-retrieve-memory-usage-on-iphone It's great !
In my project i want to retrieve the available VRAM free, because my app load many textures, and i must preload theses into the video Ram for fast rendering.
but on the VM_statistics i don't view theses properties : vm_statistics MAN page
Thanks a lot for your help.
As you've seen so far, getting hard numbers for GL texture memory usage is quite difficult. It's complicated further by the fact that CoreAnimation will also use GL Texture memory without "consulting" you, including from processes other than yours.
Practically speaking, I suggest that you use the VM Tracker instrument in Instruments to watch changes in the VM pages your process maps under the IOKit tag. It's a bit crude, but it's the best approach I've found. In my experience, this process is largely guess and check.
You asked specifically for a way to determine the amount of free VRAM, but even if you could get that info, it's not really likely to be helpful. Even if your app is totally OpenGL and uses no UIViews or CoreAnimation layers other processes, most importantly those more privileged than yours, can consume that memory at any time, either explicitly or implicitly through CoreAnimation. It's also probably safe to assume that if your app prevents those more-privileged apps from getting the texture memory they need, your process will be killed.
Put differently, even if you could ascertain the instantaneous state of the GL texture memory, you probably couldn't count on being the only consumer of that resource, so it's pretty useless.
At the end of the day, you should spend your effort designing your app to be a good citizen in terms of GL memory and manage (read: minimize) your own consumption of texture memory. iOS devices are not old-school game consoles -- you are not the only thing running -- so you need to be mindful and tolerant of that fact, lest your app be one of those where everyone has to reboot their phone every few minutes in order to use it.