Hello Folks,

I know similar questions have been asked time and time again but I ask that you please bear with me as I cannot seem to find an answer that helps.

My application has leaks that are driving me out of my mind. Actually, they are not reported as leaks using Leaks, but my net bytes in ObjectAlloc goes up and up and up and never stops, eventually leading to a crash if it goes on long enough (not very long).

The problem occurs with NSMutableStrings. I think there is either something fundamental I don't understand about them, or I am facing another problem that I am having difficulty tracking down but keeps hiding behind the NSMutableStrings. Specifically, I am noticing that whenever I append to or perform a replace on a NSMutableString, ObjectAlloc reports what appear to be mismatches in malloc/frees behind the scene when resizing the NSMutableString. I'm sorry to say this is the second time I'm facing this problem - the first time I messed around for hours and hours and finally the problem went away (magic!) but I don't really know why.

When I look at the code below (and believe me, I've stared at it for hours) I cannot see the problem. I look at the code and think to myself that I should be fine because I'm releasing the only object for which I am responsible (aString) and that NSMutableString should be taking care of cleaning up after any resizing it does. In the second example, just so you know in case it helps, the string being passed in comes from an ASIHTTPRequest object (it's the responseString) and I don't do anything at all with it. It's being called simply like so ([self DoStuff2:[request responseString]]) and I don't free the request myself either (I'm using a ASINetworkQueue and I assume that the requests are destroyed for me (I tried and caused errors because the request was already being release somewhere else).

Also, I know it shouldn't do anything, but I even tried wrapping the code in autorelease pools, which of course did nothing. I should mention that this code is being run inside of an NSOperation. I thought that perhaps I am experiencing problems because NSOperations should create an autorelease pool for themselves, but I've tried that to no avail.

Not related to NSMutableString, but I find I also have similar problems using the NSString componentsSeparatedByString method. Sometimes the memory used by the array that gets the separated components is never released. Hmmm...strings in general seem to be somewhat problematic for me it seems.

I would appreciate ANY help anyone can provide. If you require more info, I'll be glad to add it. I do promise you that I've struggled with this (and other problems) for weeks and every problem I encounter I research hard and long until I find a solution - this is not an idle request, but a true cry for help! I've written so much code and now I'm trying to seal some small leaks etc and I notice this problem. Honestly, I cannot believe how memory management in Objective C can stump me so at times...I've read Apple's memory mgmt docs many times and I thought I thoroughly understood it and I try to be diligent about releasing objects I own, but sometimes I find myself wondering if I truly understand...I would like to put this to bed once and make sure I understand all this fully - to have this sort of question/problem after writing thousands of lines of code is more than a little scary/embarrassing/annoying.

So again, if anybody has any insight, I'd be grateful. Thanks for your time and efforts.

-(void)DoStuff
{
NSString *aString [ [[NSString alloc] initWithFormat:@"text %@ more text", self.strVariable];
[self.someMutableStringVar replaceOccurrencesOfString:@"replace" withString:aString options:NSCaseInsensitiveSearch range:NSMakeRange(0, [self.someMutableStringVar length])];
[aString release];
}


-(void)DoStuff2:(NSString *)aString
{
[self.someMutableStringVar appendString:aString];
}