#ANDROID STUDIO PLUGIN MEMORY LEAK ANDROID#

The smart pins know whether they have been garbage collected or not, and after a while, if the smart pin realizes that it is still not in the trash, it takes a picture of the memory – a heap dump into the file system.

#ANDROID STUDIO PLUGIN MEMORY LEAK ANDROID#

With LeakCanary, we attach smart pins to things like my Android collectible. I know, for instance, that these Android collectibles need to be destroyed and garbage collected soon, but I’m unable to see if they have been garbage collected or not. These tiny threads add to the weight of my hand, until they become too heavy, and my hand can no longer hold on. Small memory leaks like these accumulate and become a big problem. There are extra references (keys, Square Readers) pointing to an object (Android collectible) that should no longer be pointing to that object. As a result, the Android collectible never gets garbage collected.

My keys may be attached to my Android collectible in a way that prevents it from being thrown on the floor. Unfortunately, sometimes something bad happens. Somehow, everything gets into the trash, and my hand is light again. Once I’m finished with the Android collectible, I can just throw it on the floor and a garbage collector (my Roomba, perhaps?) comes by to collect it. The Square Readers attached to the Android collectible add to the total weight, just like references take up memory. Also, for the sake of analogy, let’s say that the Square Readers must be attached to the Android collectible with some thin threads, where the threads represent references. Imagine that my Android collectible requires Square Readers to function. My hand can hold a lot of things – keys, an Android collectible, whatever. Imagine that my open hand represents the amount of memory available to our app.

But what exactly is a memory leak? Let’s start with a non-technical, illustrative example. LeakCanary is an open source library that can help put a stop to memory leaks. I want to talk about a solution to memory leaks: LeakCanary. Memory Leaks: Non-Technical Explanation (1:40) We realized we really needed to take care of those “out of memory” errors, or memory leaks. Honestly, it’s a really bad time to crash – the customer and the merchant have no idea if the payment was completed, and this is really bad when you’re dealing with money. Unfortunately, this signature screen crashes sometimes due to an “out of memory” error. During transactions in this app, the customer signs the screen with their finger. One of our products at Square is the Square Register, an app we built to take payments on your mobile device. Hi, I’m Pierre-Yves Ricau (PY for short) and I work at Square. Save the date for Droidcon SF in March - a conference with best-in-class presentations from leaders in all parts of the Android ecosystem. In his Droidcon 2015 NYC talk, Pierre teaches techniques to dramatically reduce OutOfMemoryError crashes and easily fix reference leaks, making your app more stable and usable. Square’s Pierre-Yves Ricau solved this problem by building LeakCanary, a tool to detect and help you fix memory leaks before they ship. We’ve all been bitten by memory leaks that cause OutOfMemoryError crashes in our apps at some point, sometimes even in production.

Android studio plugin memory leak