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Using the 1 Mb NSDateFormatter memory leak as a case-study, this tutorial shows how to locate and isolate unexpected memory allocation using Instruments. Technically, this 1 Mb loss is arguably not a leak, since the data is cached, and is still actively referenced by the system. Yet…

Instruments has built-in tools to isolate true leaks (lost blocks) but can also be used to locate memory loss. While this session references iPhone OS 3.1.3, it can be generalized: only the example is specific, not the concept.

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This is a follow-up to a post on stackoverflow.com, where it appears that 1 MB is lost after invoking NSFormatter -dateFromString.

I ran into the same situation, with very similar leak sizes to the ones reported on that article. Instruments shows that 868 Kb (889520 bytes to be exact) are allocated by Cocoa on iPhone OS (verified from 2.x to 3.x up to 3.1.3).
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When developing in Cocoa for Mac OS X or for iPhone, it is easy to overlook objects that are dropped in the current NSAutoreleasePool, ultimately leading to a crash. The following article applies to the use of NSAutoreleasePool when garbage collection is not enabled.

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