How do I prevent AIR privateMemory from ballooning and crashing my app?

Question

I have a memory leak problem that keeps crashing my application; the application is programmed to display ten locally-stored swfs with embedded videos in rotation. Eventually, I get this error:

adl(2986,0xacee52c0) malloc: *** mmap(size=3584000) failed (error code=12)

*** error: can't allocate region

*** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug

A trace of freeMemory usually returns between 0 and 1 MB.

A trace of totalMemory usually returns between 30 and 102 MB.

A trace of privateMemory starts around 300 MB and crashes once it hits 1.8 GB (at least on my mac)

The swfs are loaded into the app and never unloaded - we found that running unloadAndStop() would reduce the totalMemory but cause the privateMemory to escalate extremely quickly.

Yes - we have been doing all of our best practices for memory management, event listeners are all removed, unused data and objects are nulled out.

Is there a way to get the AIR app to return privateMemory allocated to it back to the OS? The garbage collector won't do it.

Using AIR 2.7 (for use on a linux box)

Tony-Downey · Answer

EDIT: Brilliant - after a day of testing, the memory leak has been tracked down. Some swfs loaded worked fine and never increased the privateMemory - but swfs with multiple TLFTextFields would add at least 13MB of privateMemory that could not be unloaded from the AIR app.

SWF set-up:

Nothing on frame 1
A containerMC on frame 3 containing an animation with between zero and 6 TLFTextFields
App loads in SWF, stops the SWF on frame one.
On SWF play, app moves the playhead to frame 3, playing an animation with TLFTextFields
On complete, app moves the playhead back to frame 1 and sets visible to false
Between zero and one TLFTextfield, no memory leak.
No memory leak when using TextFields.

Is this a documented bug? That loading in swf files using more than one TLFTextField will continually add to the memory footprint?

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.