ARC use – App ‘pausing’ and crashing without crash log

[SagarTilekar]

Hi,
We are using ARC in a project for the iPhone and iPad and have observed a strange behavior:

Every once in a while the application goes into a ‘Paused’ state. This state actually quits the app but does not give any debugging information or a crash log. We have seen this happen when we try to access large images and display them in the app.

Although the app does fire Memory warnings once in a while, the crash is not related to the memory warning. Even running the app in Instruments shows no leaks and a total memory map of just 3.8mb.

Any help with this is appreciated.

[michelle]

Originally Posted by SagarTilekar

Hi,
We are using ARC in a project for the iPhone and iPad and have observed a strange behavior:

Every once in a while the application goes into a ‘Paused’ state. This state actually quits the app but does not give any debugging information or a crash log. We have seen this happen when we try to access large images and display them in the app.

Although the app does fire Memory warnings once in a while, the crash is not related to the memory warning. Even running the app in Instruments shows no leaks and a total memory map of just 3.8mb.

Any help with this is appreciated.

Sadly we found out the hard way that ARC isn't a substitute for good memory leak testing. ARC is a good idea, Apple should of implemented much sooner, but it is new and actually quite buggy.

The ARC wizard is actually a pain to use at time , and only seems to work if the application is configured for the simulator.

Its runtime can be buggy and also introduce memory leaks.

As for no crash log, we've seen this countless times regardless of using ARC or not using ARC.

[Duncan C]

Originally Posted by michelle

Sadly we found out the hard way that ARC isn't a substitute for good memory leak testing. ARC is a good idea, Apple should of implemented much sooner, but it is new and actually quite buggy.

The ARC wizard is actually a pain to use at time , and only seems to work if the application is configured for the simulator.

Its runtime can be buggy and also introduce memory leaks.

As for no crash log, we've seen this countless times regardless of using ARC or not using ARC.

As far as I can tell, the lack of crash logs seems to be a "feature" of Xcode 4.0 or 4.2, regardless of memory management settings. I get a lot of crashes that are shown as in main.m with no stack trace, where in Xcode 3.x, it would show me the specific line of code that caused the problem.

(I can't remember now if this started with 4.0 or 4.2. I don't have 4.0 around any more, but I do have 3.2.5. I have specific fail cases where 3.2.5 shows the exact line of an error, and 4.2 just says "splat."