If we use NSAutoreleasePool * pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init]; then what method is used, either drain or release for lates iOS.
no garbage collection on iOS.
I do what apple suggests in the documentation:
In a garbage-collected environment,
release is a no-op, so unless you do
not want to give the collector a hint
it is important to use drain in any
code that may be compiled for a
garbage-collected environment.
On iOS NSAutoreleasePool will drain when it goes out of the scope where it is defined (as long as no other reference is held). During the drain, it will release all objects held by it.
Thus, calling release might result in a drain, as long as it's the last reference to the pool.
This is different from the traditional GC where the collector is not scope bound and in general works independently of the main app code flow.
Related
When has happen to the release method? I always release a memory allocation when I am done with it and now it seems that the method has been deprecated. Or maybe it does not work for some objects?
Anyway, this is what I did:
Customer *aCustomer = [[Customer alloc] init];
...
[aCustomer release];
and I get an error there... Anyone care to explain why I get an error now that I release my memory? The error message is:
'release' in unavailable: not available in automatic reference
counting mode ARC forbids explicit message send of 'release'
If you have enabled the 'ARC', then you don't need to release an object. That will be handled by the compiler. retain, release and autorelease are all handled by the compiler.
Edit:
You could know more about that from here
Also there already a SO thread exists. Please go thru that.
To manage memory by yourself go to "build settings" and set the flag "Objective-C automatic reference counting" to "No" (it's under "Apple LLVM compiler")
Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) for Objective-C makes memory
management the job of the compiler. By enabling ARC with the new Apple
LLVM compiler, you will never need to type retain or release again,
dramatically simplifying the development process, while reducing
crashes and memory leaks. The compiler has a complete understanding of
your objects, and releases each object the instant it is no longer
used, so apps run as fast as ever, with predictable, smooth
performance.
- iOS 5 for Developers
Consider using ARC (Automatic Retain Counting) for your project. There is a refactoring that will convert a current project.
I have a question. My case study is that I have two big SQLite databases and I want to use threads (meaning 2 processes simultaneously). Did it work well? I have written the following code:
NSAutoreleasePool *dbPool;
dbPool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];
/* All Database work is performed here */
[dbPool release];
Please guide me. Am I doing this correctly or not? Should I use a pool to drain or release?
And in that way is this using concurrent processes, meaning it's also the same behavior as multitasking?
Thanks in advance!
Yep, you're doing it right. Each of your new thread needs own autorelease pool.
Regarding to your question about release / drain of pool, recommended is drain message.
What do you mean by sqlite database? How do you access it? If you access it via CoreData, you have keep following in your memory:
you need one NSManagedObjectContext per thread,
do not pass NSManagedObjects to another thread, just pass object ID,
before you pass object ID to another thread, save it in thread where it was modified / created before passing it.
There are more rules, but these are basic ones.
Multitasking means that you can run more applications in one time. Multithreading (= your case) means that your application does use more threads to achieve its task.
A common approach for user interface or other heavy object management work is to surround your code like you're doing, but you should be using drain:
NSAutoreleasePool *dbPool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];
// do your work
[dbPool drain];
A lot of detail on NSAutoreleasePool is available here and a previous Stack Overflow answer here. Basically the work you're doing inside the pool, if set to autorelease, will be released once the pool drains. This can increase performance when working with certain classes that produce autoreleased instances. If you want full and immediate control though, you can release each object you're working with once it's no longer needed and ditch the pool altogether.
As to your multithreading questions I'm not sure if I understand what you're asking but nonetheless using the pool is a solid approach even in a background thread. This is assuming that the objects you're working with in the thread aren't somehow also used in another (since you might have an accidental release).
Why would you drain an autorelease pool instead of releasing it?
One reason is for garbage collection (not available on iPhone)
release is a no-op with GC enabled, but drain provides a hint to the garbage collector
From the docs:
Garbage Collection
In a garbage-collected environment, there is no need for autorelease pools. You may, however, write a framework that is designed to work in both a garbage-collected and reference-counted environment. In this case, you can use autorelease pools to hint to the collector that collection may be appropriate. In a garbage-collected environment, sending a drain message to a pool triggers garbage collection if necessary; release, however, is a no-op. In a reference-counted environment, drain has the same effect as release. Typically, therefore, you should use drain instead of release.
The best answer here is "because Apple tell you to".
Following Apple's "best practices" is the best way to improve your chances of being forward compatible.
I'm looking for a primary source (or a really good explanation) to back up the claim that the use of autorelease is dangerous or overly expensive when writing software for the iPhone.
Several developers make this claim, and I have even heard that Apple does not recommend it, but I have not been able to turn up any concrete sources to back it up.
SO references:
autorelease-iphone
Why does this create a memory leak (iPhone)?
Note: I can see, from a conceptual point of view, that autorelease is slightly more expensive than a simple call to release, but I don't think that small penalty is enough to make Apple recommend against it.
What's the real story?
(cannot accept your own answer?)
Well, after all that, I did manage to find a reference from Apple Developer, added as a side-note near the bottom of the page:
iPhone OS Note: Because on iPhone OS
an application executes in a more
memory-constrained environment, the
use of autorelease pools is
discouraged in methods or blocks of
code (for example, loops) where an
application creates many objects.
Instead, you should explicitly release
objects whenever possible.
Still, this suggests using autorelease carefully, not avoiding it altogether.
(and now for my comment)
It sounds like there is a certain amount of overhead in maintaining the pool. I read this article which would lead me to probably avoid autorelease as much as possible because I prefer things to be consistent. If you have some memory under autorelease and other memory being totally manually managed it can be a bit more confusing.
It is not the question to use or not to use autorelease, because in some cases autorelease is the only way you'll get through. The question should be "Why not to use autorelease on all objects, instead of using retain and release?".
To answer that, you should first learn what's a proper use for autorelease. Let's say that you have a class that has two properties: firstName and lastName. There is a getter and a setter for each. But you also need a method that would return fullName, by concatenating these two strings into a brand new string:
- (NSString *) fullName {
NSString str = [[NSString alloc]initWithFormat:#"%# %#", firstName, lastName];
// this is not good until we put [str autorelease];
return str;
}
What's wrong with that picture? The reference count on the returned string is 1, so if you don't want to leak, the caller should release it when he's done. From the caller's point of view, he just requested a property value fullName. He is unaware of the fact that he got a brand new object that he should release after usage, and not some reference to an NSString internally held by the class!
If we put the [str release] before return, the string would be destroyed and the method would return garbage! That's where we use [str autorelease], to mark the object for release at a later time (typically when the event processing is done). That way the caller gets his object, and does not have to worry whether he should release it or not.
The convention is to call autorelease on a new object before the method returns it to the caller. Exceptions are methods with names that start with alloc, new or copy. In such cases the callers know that a brand new object is created for them and it is their duty to call release on that object.
Replacing release with autorelease altogether is a bad idea, since the objects would pile up and clog the memory very quickly, especially in loops. The resources on the iPhone are limited, so in order to minimize memory hogging, it is your duty to release the object as soon as you're done with it.
I disagree that avoiding autorelease altogether is wise.
Cocoa Touch uses it quite frequently internally and for many situations it's the only way to allocate memory properly (a good example is reusable table view cells). If you understand what is happening, the autorelease pool is a great tool at your disposal. The main thing to remember is that the blocks are not freed until some point later in the run loop. If you are running a tight loop without user interaction and are piling up autorelease blocks, you will eventually run out of memory.
Autorelease is not a substitute for garbage collection (not available on in the iPhone SDK) and can lead to nasty dangling pointer bugs (the pointer still seems to be good, then at some unpredictable point goes invalid), but is also very useful in writing clear and easy to maintain code. Consider the following case:
[aDictionary writeToFile:
[documentsDirectory stringByAppendingPathComponent:#"settings.plist"]
atomically:YES];
The path string is generated as an autorelease object. We aren't required to create a temporary object, so we avoid that overhead (and the possibility we might forget to release it). The memory will be fully released (no leaks), just that it will happen later in the run loop. Ask yourself: am I going to allocate hundreds of these before I get back to user input? If no (as would be the case here), autorelease is a great solution and indeed this NSString method for working with paths is only available using autoreleased memory.
I do agree with the above poster that following convention and being consistent is a very good idea.
I tend to avoid using autorelease on the iPhone where I can (as Jon points out, you can't always do without it), simply because I like to know that the objects I'm working with are released the instant I don't need them. Memory constraints are one of the largest problems you'll face on the device and I believe they're the source of most of the crashing issues you'll find out there.
As highlighted by Apple, a particular area of concern is when you use autoreleased objects within any kind of loop, because they'll pile up within the autorelease pool. You then have to manage when to drain the pool or create / release one. Doing that every pass through the loop might degrade performance, but going too many passes without could lead to dangerous memory usage. I'm still tweaking this in Molecules, because there are intermittent memory issues when importing large (>2 MB) text files from the Protein Data Bank. I was able to improve performance by minimizing autoreleased objects, but couldn't eliminate them completely.
Another area to watch out for is using autoreleased objects with threads. If at all possible, do not use autoreleased objects when dealing with methods performed on a background thread, because the pool can be drained at random times. This leads to intermittent crashes that can be really fun to track down.
I would highly suggest avoiding autorelease like the plague. Memory management bugs are a great way to waste massive amounts of time and money, I've had the dubious honor of going through the process many a time on old Mac apps, and the fact that the iPhone has tight memory constraints mean that you have to be extremely careful, or the app will just be unstable and crash often...like so many of the first apps that were released last summer.
The only reliable way I've found to write stable iPhone applications is to manage all your memory yourself, and do it consistently. Even if you are the only programmer on your project, you'll thank yourself later. It can be difficult if you learned to program in languages that "take care of everything for you," but it really is worth learning how to do well if you are serious about createing quality iPhone apps.
Coming up towards the end of developing an iPhone application and I'm wondering just how bad is it to use autorelease when developing for the iphone. I'm faced with some fairly random crashes and, so far, I can't pinpoint it to anything other than sloppy memory usage.
As a Cocoa newbie I remember initially reading a guideline document that strongly suggested avoiding autorelease in favor of manual retain/release for iPhone. However, a more 'senior' Cocoa developer came on board early on (who ironically has been let go since), who used autorelease all over the place. Admittedly, I was went into "monkey see monkey do" mode, and it appears to be coming back to haunt me (I'm now the only developer on the project).
So what to do next? It seems to me that I have to branch the code and try to go through and replace, where possible, autorelease code keeping my fingers crossed that I don't inadvertently break the app. It seems a lot of library calls result in autoreleased objects like stringWithFormat and pretty much anything where I'm not using alloc myself. Any other gotchyas and/or suggestions I should be looking out for? Thanks Cocoa gurus.
Using release instead of autorelease can improve memory usage in tight spots (which is good on the iPhone), but it's not going to help at all with crashing if you're not following the retain / release rules. I would read a few tutorials on memory management in Obj-C if you're still a little hazy on what you should be doing, and then go after those crashes using the debugger and crash reports to find out where you're over releasing objects. This and this are two good places to start.
More important than the autorelease or manual-release choice is how often you alloc and dealloc your NSAutoreleasePools. Since most of the Cocoa frameworks use autorelease liberally, you need to have a proper pool draining strategy. Once that is in place, the choice of whether to release or autorelease becomes much less an issue.
That being said, the only areas you should worry about are tight loops--allocate and release an NSAutoreleasePool every few iterations for best results; and when you have spawned another NSThread that doesn't have a Runloop--create a pool and drain it every so often becomes idle. Since most applications only allocate a small amount of data per event, UIKit's strategy of allocating the pool before the event is dispatched and releasing it after the dispatch returns works very well.
If you think you dunno how to use autorelease, check out CS193p FALL 2010 on iTunes U -> Lecture number 4.
It teaches you all about memory management and stuff (if you skip the first 10 minutes or so)
For iPhone performance reasons, Apple suggest that, whenever possible, you shouldn't use autoreleased objects. Instead, explicitly release your objects when you are done with them.
Using autorelease pools means that you might be leaving some unused memory lying around. Since the iPhone has less memory to go around, you might improve performance if you free up unneeded memory as soon as possible, rather than letting it sit around taking up resources while it waits for an autorelease.
When you autorelease, you're basically saying: "I don't need this any longer, but anyone else is free to pick it up (before the auto release pool is drained)". When you explicitly relase an object you're saying: "I don't need this any longer and unless anyone else has already said otherwise (acquired), it should be deallocated immediately."
Consequently, autorelease is not normally the wrong thing to. It is required when you want to pass objects back to the sender of a message without requiring the sender to take care of releasing the object.