What Android tools and methods work best to find memory/resource leaks?

Question

I've got an Android app developed, and I'm at the point of a phone app development where everything seems to be working well and you want to declare victory and ship, but you know there just have to be some memory and resource leaks in there; and there's only 16mb of heap on the Android and its apparently surprisingly easy to leak in an Android app.

I've been looking around and so far have only been able to dig up info on 'hprof' and 'traceview' and neither gets a lot of favorable reviews.

What tools or methods have you come across or developed and care to share maybe in an OS project?

Can I vote to have Р̀СТȢѸ́ФХѾЦЧШЩЪЫЬѢѤЮѦѪѨѬѠѺѮѰѲѴ change his name to something human readable. — JPM, Feb 11 '15 at 16:47
would it be ok to reopen this question if we remove the word "Android Tools" from the question-title? The answers found here were quite usefull to solve my memory leak problems — k3b, Jul 05 '15 at 07:49
Okay, so I have a user constantly switching between activities, meaning they may have switched 15 activities in 20 seconds. Could that be a cause of an out of memory error? What should I do to fix it? Thanks! — Ruchir Baronia, Jan 05 '16 at 05:45
Can't provide this as a response because the question has been closed, however I'd recommend taking a look at [Leak Canary](https://github.com/square/leakcanary). Just use your app, open and close activities and let the library do it's job. It will even tell you about where the leak occured. Just give the leak analyzer some time to do its work after the leak occured - it usually takes around 2 minutes or more until the source of the leak has been found. After that it will present it to you neatly in-app. No extra tools needed! — ubuntudroid, Jan 02 '17 at 19:55

score 29 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 20 '10 at 08:10

29

Get the Eclipse Memory Analyzer ( http://www.eclipse.org/mat/) Check http://kohlerm.blogspot.com/2010/02/android-memory-usage-analysis-slides.html and http://kohlerm.blogspot.com/search/label/memory

answered Apr 20 '10 at 08:10

kohlerm

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score 28 · Answer 2 · answered May 09 '11 at 11:03

28

Mostly for Google travelers from the future:

Most java tools are unfortunately unsuitable for this task, because they only analyze the JVM-Heap. Every Android Application also has a native heap, though, which also has to fit within the ~16 MB limit. It's usually used for bitmap data, for example. So you can run quite easily into Out Of Memory errors even though your JVM-Heap is chillin around 3 MBs, if you use a lot of drawables.

answered May 09 '11 at 11:03

Timo Ohr

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starting Android 3.0 (honeycomb) drawables are stored in the heap – Gu1234 Sep 13 '11 at 08:16
@Timo then what would you use to detect leaks in the native heap? – sydd Dec 05 '11 at 02:59
1

Testing, lots of testing. Problem is that you can't even really tell how much memory your app is using, due to memory sharing and other optimization techniques. You can get memory readings using the usual shell commands, but those are very, very rough estimates. – Timo Ohr Dec 06 '11 at 09:03

score 20 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 29 '13 at 15:15

The answer from @hp.android works well if you are just working with bitmap backgrounds but, in my case, I had a BaseAdapter providing a set of ImageViews for a GridView. I modified the unbindDrawables() method as advised so that the condition is:

if (view instanceof ViewGroup && !(view instanceof AdapterView)) {
  ...
}

but the problem then is that the recursive method never processes the children of the AdapterView. To address this, I instead did the following:

if (view instanceof ViewGroup) {
  ViewGroup viewGroup = (ViewGroup) view;
  for (int i = 0; i < viewGroup.getChildCount(); i++)
    unbindDrawables(viewGroup.getChildAt(i));

  if (!(view instanceof AdapterView))
    viewGroup.removeAllViews();
}

so that the children of the AdapterView are still processed -- the method just doesn't attempt to remove all children (which is unsupported).

This doesn't quite fix the problem however since ImageViews manage a bitmap that is not their background. I therefore added the following. It's not ideal but it works:

if (view instanceof ImageView) {
  ImageView imageView = (ImageView) view;
  imageView.setImageBitmap(null);
}

Overall the unbindDrawables() method is then:

private void unbindDrawables(View view) {
  if (view.getBackground() != null)
    view.getBackground().setCallback(null);

  if (view instanceof ImageView) {
    ImageView imageView = (ImageView) view;
    imageView.setImageBitmap(null);
  } else if (view instanceof ViewGroup) {
    ViewGroup viewGroup = (ViewGroup) view;
    for (int i = 0; i < viewGroup.getChildCount(); i++)
    unbindDrawables(viewGroup.getChildAt(i));

    if (!(view instanceof AdapterView))
      viewGroup.removeAllViews();
  }
}

I'm hoping there is a more principled approach to freeing up such resources.

score 12 · Answer 4 · answered Apr 16 '12 at 22:30

12

Good Google I/O talk (2011) on Memory Management in Android, as well as details on tools + techniques for memory profiling:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CruQY55HOk

answered Apr 16 '12 at 22:30

greg7gkb

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Or the corresponding blog post: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/03/memory-analysis-for-android.html – greg7gkb Apr 17 '12 at 00:35
1

Okay, so I have a user constantly switching between activities, meaning they may have switched 15 activities in 20 seconds. Could that be a cause of an out of memory error? What should I do to fix it? Thanks!' – Ruchir Baronia Jan 05 '16 at 05:44

score 4 · Answer 5 · answered Oct 19 '11 at 02:39

4

Valgrind has been ported to Android (sponsored by Mozilla). See Valgrind on Android — Current Status and Support Running Valgrind for Android on ARM (comment 67).

answered Oct 19 '11 at 02:39

jww

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that would require a custom rom to be built. – Akshat Jun 16 '12 at 03:55

score 1 · Answer 6 · answered Jul 18 '09 at 16:46

1

Well, those are the tools that hook with the unique formats that Android uses..I think what you may be unsatisfied with is the underlying testing code framework in use..

Have you tried mock testing areas of code using the Android Mock Framework?

answered Jul 18 '09 at 16:46

Fred Grott

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not so much, testing of that nature isn't so much the issue as recording what's actually happening while the application runs, what I really need is a resource/memory leak profiling tool – jottos Jul 20 '09 at 18:48

What Android tools and methods work best to find memory/resource leaks?

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