Autorelease pools and fonts

MacOSX and iOS
1

Hi All,
I have a question. It is with reference to this link.

Crash in Font Class on Snow Leopard
http://www.rawmaterialsoftware.com/juceforum/viewtopic.php?t=4435

As I had said in the thread, I had moved Font code from juce 1.50 to juce 1.39 to fix it. But I didn’t move the ScopedAutoReleasePool code, because I thought it was not needed.

Yesterday I had to face a issue, if I tried load displaying all the glyphs in the font on my application it used to take 4-5 mins, hanging in mac frameworks.

But after I moved ScopedAutoReleasePool to my cocktail version of juce. The Hang reduced dramatically to 4 seconds.

Any specific reason for this behaviour? :?:

2

Without the AutoreleasePool you were probably leaking objects like crazy and then started paging out. In the console it probably would have spat out a bunch of No AutoreleasePool messages in place.

There are a only a few “autoreleased” objects in the font class.
ie. [NSFontManager sharedFontManager]
[NSMutableDictionary dictionaryWithObject]
[NSBezierPath bezierPath]

but when you are iterating over a few fonts with lots of glyphs, that adds up fast!

Hope that helps

Justin

3

It did and helped me crack the hang :slight_smile: . But it sounds odd that leaks involving 155 characters can cause my application to hang!!!:shock:

You could be right here, because the delay is only for the first load after that it runs smoothly.

4

The Instruments app is awesome(objectalloc I think?) for this kind of stuff. Set it to still living objects, and sort by net. If that number is climbing and climbing and not going down, you are leaking! I think you can even set it to watch just Appkit/Cocoa objects.

The graph is fun to watch too! All that memory getting gobbled up, we’re such pigs these days.

5

Oh one more tip…I haven’t tried it, but just read about it the other day. In Spin Control(also in Performance tools), you can set it to watch for a spin lock. So when your app hangs it starts sampling and then you can track down what it was doing.

I think there’s an option in Shark as well. If I find it i’ll post it here.

6

It never occurred to me that it had something to do with memory leaks, I tried profiling it using shark but to no avail. Shark hanged :shock:. It’s a good tip though.

7

In a pinch i’ve used Activity Monitor in /Applications/Utilities, double click your app name and then you can sample from there.

8

This is by far the simplest to use.

9

Just an extra input, xcode on leopard and snow leopard has a performance tool called Leaks( for detecting memory leaks), I found it the most simplest of the application to use.

Just go to run menu ->Run with Performace Tools -> Leaks.