CFNetwork sendDidReceiveDataCallback autorelease "leak"

[bonehead]

I'm at the point where I'm profiling and optimizing my application. I'm seeing a situation where CFNetwork sendDidReceiveDataCallback is creating a slew of very large objects (GeneralBlock-32768) and, from what I can tell, leaving them in my app's main autorelease pool (created in the main() function).

This is OK if the application is only used for a few minutes, but after a while they really add up, taking something like 5/7ths of all the memory used by the application. Because they're in the main autorelease pool, they're never released until the app is closed.

I've tried wrapping various network-intensive portions of the app with my own inner autorelease pools, and draining those as appropriate; however, it looks like these allocations are not added to that autorelease pool-- instead they're added to the main autorelease pool in CFRunLoopRunInMode.

Any suggestions on how I can occasionally clean out these allocations?

[scottiphone]

I'd report it as a bug.

[jeff_lamarche]

I would report it as a bug, but as a workaround, have you tried wrapping the calls that generate this in their own autorelease pool? Though it shouldn't be necessary - callbacks should be happening on the main thread (the thread from which they are called) unless documented otherwise, and the main thread always has an autorelease pool.

Or, are you perhaps, setting the callback from within a thread? In that case, the callback will probably function on that thread, and if your thread method has ended and released its autorelease pool, then that would explain the problem. You can fix that problem by calling a method on the main thread to set the callback.

But if you're doing everything in the main thread, then I'd definitely file it as a bug, and try wrapping the calls to like this as a workaround:

NSAutoreleasePool *pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];
...code that generates leak message
[pool release];

[bonehead]

Yeah I'm not explicitly creating a separate thread, I'm simply loading network data using NSURLConnection.

I've tried wrapping the NSURLConnection instance with an autorelease pool such that I create a new pool before creating the NSURLConnection, and then drain the pool after the NSURLConnection completes. However, the app's main pool eventually accumulates a bunch of 32768 blocks. Sounds like a bug...