cocoa touch - iOS: helpfulness of didReceiveMemoryWarning:

Question

I'm at the part of my development process for tracking down crashing and memory leaks. As a strategy, do you put any NSLog messages or notifications of some such into didReceiveMemoryWarning:? The documentation for this method is rather sparse. Is it accurate to say that before a crash will happen, the UIViewController will trigger that method? Is that a starting point before even going forward with Instruments?

Answer 1

OK, several things to note:

• didReceiveMemoryWarning will be called before an out-of-memory crash. Not other crashes. If you handle the warning properly and free up memory, then you can avoid the out-of-memory condition and not crash.
• You can manually trigger a memory warning in the simulator under the Hardware menu. Highly recommend doing this to test your handling of didReceiveMemoryWarning.
• Instruments helps you debug leaks (though not all of them) - it's not really that useful for crashes.
• No, I don't personally use NSLog - I just breakpoint the memory warnings when I'm debugging.