Ways To Detect Android Memory Leak

By Author: Kelly Burby
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Memory leak is an awful security lapse in Android OS. It is considered malicious as a single code may make the application crashed. Memory leak can also create a number of issues in applications. A memory leak probably occurs when storage in heap is created and then not deleted. It is of course a horrible problem in any application.

There are generally two types of memory related errors: out of memory and memory leakage. The first type of memory error tries to allocate memory that the heap of application has. It’s difficult to find leakage. But it can simply be identified once the application begins receiving a crash report. But not all crashes are caused by memory leakages and thus it turns out to be difficult to find memory leakage. If an object is held for a long period even its purpose has finished, memory leakage can occur. However, there is garbage collector collecting data objects, but once application hold these objects, even garbage collector will be useless.

Tools are here to test leaks. Mat plug-in, Eclipse memory analyzer, Valgrind, and Android SDK’s traceview are the names to a few ...
... of them. There are two ways offered by Android SDK to outline the memory usage of an application. These include heap dumps and tracker.

The first one, heap dumps have been proved as a remarkable tool for cache analysis. Consider it as the image of the heap of an app. Analyzing usage of RAM is a challenge for every Android developer. Once application begins to release unemployed objects from the app, it can retain more space for storage than it required.

The second one is tracker. The tracker method can be used by developers to discover the usage of memory in particular period. However, it cannot provide complete status of the heap of the application.

Another best tool is Eclipse memory analyzer (MAT). It is one of the best tools to analyze that how much storage is used by applications. It is also quite useful in tracking memory leakage. Also with this tool, Android developers can analyze the app at a regular gap. MAT can also provide the usage of memory for a particular period of time. However one thing every developer using MAT need to remember that it neither give any reason for object or nor can it show the objects collected by the garbage collector, but it is easy to quickly discover the memory leakage and stop it.

One more important tool for this purpose is DDMS which can sense storage allocation. The Android SDK directly has this tool. When using this tool, it displays memory leakage in apps. Apart from this, it can also show relative information about the object.

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