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Introduction

The fundamentals describe how LeakCanary works and how to use it to detect and fix memory leaks. This documentation is designed to help developers of all levels, so please don’t hesitate to report any confusing section.

What is a memory leak?

In a Java based runtime, a memory leak is a programming error that causes an application to keep a reference to an object that is no longer needed. As a result, the memory allocated for that object cannot be reclaimed.

For example, an Android Activity instance is no longer needed after its onDestroy() method is called, and storing a reference to that instance in a static field prevents it from being garbage collected.

Common causes for memory leaks

Most memory leaks are caused by bugs related to the lifecycle of objects. Here are a few common Android mistakes:

  • Adding a Fragment instance to the backstack without clearing that Fragment’s view fields in Fragment.onDestroyView() (more details in this StackOverflow answer).
  • Storing an Activity instance as a Context field in an object that survives activity recreation due to configuration changes.
  • Registering a listener, broadcast receiver or RxJava subscription which references an object with lifecycle, and forgetting to unregister when the lifecycle reaches its end.

Why should I use LeakCanary?

Memory leaks are very common in Android apps. As small memory leaks accumulate, memory usage grows, the Garbage Collector (GC) runs more frequently and consumes more CPU, causing jank, UI freezes and Application Not Responding (ANR) reports, eventually leading to an OutOfMemoryError (OOME) crash. LeakCanary will help you find and fix these memory leaks during development. When Square engineers first enabled LeakCanary in the Square Point Of Sale app, they were able to fix several leaks and reduced the OOM crash rate by 94%.

Info

Your crash reporting tool might not correctly report OOMEs. When memory is low because of memory leak accumulation, an OOM can be thrown from anywhere in the app code, which means that every OOM has a different stacktrace. So instead of one crash entry with a 1000 crashes, OOMs get reported as 1000 distinct crashes and hide in the long tail of low occurring crashes.

What’s next? Learn how LeakCanary works!