A small leak can crash a great app

Memory Leaks :( As android engineers, this is a problem we face or are likely to face during the lifetime of our career. Debugging this kind of issue kind be quite tedious and frustrating. Without proper knowledge of what to look for, finding the root cause of such issues is really difficult. For this session, we are going to tackle memory leaks head on. We are going to go through the various causes of these memory leaks and how to handle each one. We are also going to take a look at various tools that you can use to pinpoint leaks so that you can easily fix them.

Transcript

1. .droidconKe A Small Leak Can Crash a Great APP
2. Software Consultancy .droidconKe Mobile First USSD Backends Frontends
3. About me • Software Engineer (Android & Python) • Devops enthusiast • Dancer • Technical writer .droidconKe
4. What is a memory leak? .droidconKe
5. Failure in a program (app) to release discarded memory .droidconKe
6. Enter Android Piece of logic runs longer than it's expected lifecycle .droidconKe IO operation goes rogue
7. Enter Android .droidconKe
8. Characteristics • Very difficult to detect • Affect performance • Lead to undesirable behaviour .droidconKe
9. Causes .droidconKe • Storing lifecycle aware logic in application-scoped variables • Static variables • Inner classes • Callbacks/Listeners
10. Causes .droidconKe
11. Causes .droidconKe • Unbound IO operations (Bad concurrency management) • Rogue threads • Using wrong scopes (Kotlin threads) • Forgetting unregister Broadcast Receivers • Non static inner classes
12. Causes .droidconKe
13. Why should we care? .droidconKe • We should be compassionate to all users of our apps
14. What can we do? .droidconKe • Don't hold strong references to lifecycle objects. Use weak references if you really must. • Use structured concurrency, if you can [Kotlin :) ] • Use the right scopes (lifecycleScope, viewModelScope etc) • Remember to unregister you broadcast recievers • If you have logic which needs to survive the lifecycle, use the WorkManager • Use the application context when dealing with singletons
15. Any tools available? .droidconKe • LeakCanary • Android memory profile
16. Q&A .droidconKe
17. .droidconKe