You are currently viewing Detecting and Fixing Memory leaks in Susi Android App

Detecting and Fixing Memory leaks in Susi Android App

In the fast development of the Susi App, somehow developers missed out some memory leaks in the app. It is a very common mistake that developers do. Most new android developers don’t know much about Memory leaks and how to fix them. Memory leaks makes the app slower and causes crashes due to OutOfMemoryException. To make the susi app more efficient, it is advised to look out for these memory leaks and fix them. This post will focus on teaching developers who’ll be contributing in Susi android App or any other android app about the memory leaks, detecting them and fixing them.

What is a memory leak?

Android system manages memory allocation to run the apps efficiently. When memory runs short, it triggers Garbage Collector (GC) which cleans up the objects which are no longer useful, clearing up memory for other useful objects. But, suppose a case when a non-useful object is referenced from a useful object. In that case Garbage Collector would mark the non-useful object as useful and thus won’t be able to remove it, causing a Memory Leak.

Now, when a memory leak occurs, the app demands for memory from the android system but the android system can only give a certain amount of memory and after that point it will refuse to give more memory and thus causing a OutOfMemoryException and crashing the app. Even if sometime due to memory leaks, the app doesn’t crash but it surely will slow down and skip frames.

Now, few other questions arises, like “How to detect these leaks?” , “What causes these leaks ?” and “How can we fix these?” Let’s cover these one by one.

Detecting Memory Leaks

You can detect memory leaks in android app in two ways :

  1. Using Android Studio
  2. Using Leak Canary

In this post I’ll be describing the way to use Leak Canary to detect Memory Leaks. If you want to know about the way to use android studio to detect leaks, check out this link .

Using Leak Canary for Memory Leak detection :

Leak Canary is a very handy tool when it comes to detecting memory leaks. It shows the memory leak in an another app in the mobile itself. Just add these lines under the dependencies in build.gradle file.

debugCompile ‘com.squareup.leakcanary:leakcanary-android:1.5.1’
releaseCompile ‘com.squareup.leakcanary:leakcanary-android-no-op:1.5.1’
testCompile ‘com.squareup.leakcanary:leakcanary-android-no-op:1.5.1’

And this code here in the MainApplication.java file.

if (LeakCanary.isInAnalyzerProcess(this)) {
// This process is dedicated to LeakCanary for heap analysis.

// You should not init your app in this process.

return
;
}
LeakCanary.install(this);
// Normal app init code…

You are good to go. Now just run the app and if there is a memory leak you will get something like this. It dumps the memory in .hprof file and displays it in another app.

      

Causes of Memory Leaks

There are many causes of memory leaks. I will list a few top of my head but there can be more.

  1. Static Activities and Views : Defining a static variable inside the class definition of the Activity and then setting it to the running instance of that Activity. If this reference is not cleared before the Activity’s lifecycle completes, the Activity will be leaked.
  2. Listeners : When you register a listener, it is advised to unregister it in onDestroy() method to prevent memory leaks. It is not that prominent but may cause memory leaks.
  3. Inner Classes : If you create an instance of Inner Class and maintain a static reference to it, there is a chance of memory leak.
  4. Anonymous Classes : A leak can occur if you declare and instantiate an AsyncTask anonymously inside your Activity. If it continues to perform background work after the Activity has been destroyed, the reference to the Activity will persist and it won’t be garbage collected until after the background task completes.
  5. Handlers and Threads : The very same principle applies to background tasks declared anonymously by a Runnable object and queued up for execution by a Handler object.

Preventing and Fixing Memory Leaks

So, now you know what are the causes of these memory leaks. You just have to be a little more careful while implementing these. Here are some more tips to prevent or fix memory leaks :

  1. Be extra careful when dealing with Inner classes and Anonymous classes. Make them static wherever possible. Use a static inner class with a WeakReference to the outer class if that helps.
  2. Be very careful with a static variable in your activity class because it can reference your activity and cause leak. Be sure to remove the reference in onDestroy().
  3. Unregister all listeners in onDestroy() method.
  4. Always terminate worker threads you initiated on Activity onDestroy().
  5. Make sure that your allocated resources are all collected as expected. Do not always rely on Garbage Collector.
  6. Try using the context-application instead of a context-activity.

Conclusion

So, now if you want to contribute in Susi Android App and implement a feature in it, you can just check if there is a memory leak due to your implementation and fix it for better performance of the app. Also, if you find any other memory leak in the app, do report it on the issue tracker, fix it and make the Susi Android App more efficient.

Happy Coding!

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.