Detecting memory leaks on Android apps

More often than it should you find yourself wondering if your application is leaking memory and if so what, where and how.
A lot of questions that usually don't have enough answers.
There are many well know ways your application can leak memory. To name a few

• static references to Contexts, Views or Activities
• inner classes holding a reference to the outer class
• anonymous classes, commonly used in listeners
• drawables holding a reference to the Context
• and many more cases

If you are interested in more detailed descriptions of these common ways your app can leak memory this article will help you.

Also, as there are pitfalls there are tools to help you find them. Again, to name a few

• Android Studio monitors
• dalvik and art GC log messages
• heap dumps
• dumpsys
• etc.

To do an effective use of these tools and uncover memory leaks you should stress your app, running it for a while, or forcing continuous invocations of Activities, perhaps navigation back to the Home screen and launching the Activity again and again. While you can do this manually and the most obvious cases will be detected, it is always more efficient to automate these steps so they can be run before and after to verify that you actually solved the problem.
And what better than AndroidViewClient/culebra to automate these steps as we have discussed so many times in previous articles. Precisely, one of the latest additions is the ability to capture dumpsys information and create plots with it.

This is an example of a method we can define to exercise our Activities including some extra steps like stopping the application to start clean and forcing garbage collection along the way (see complete source code here)

def __plot_dumpsys_meminfo(self, pkg, activity, method=None):
    self.device.shell("am force-stop %s" % pkg)
    for n in range(20):
        if n % 5 == 0:
            self.device.shell(
                "run-as %s pgrep -L 10 %s" % (pkg, pkg))
        self.device.startActivity("%s/%s" % (pkg, activity))
        time.sleep(2)
        if method:
            method()
        self.plot.append(Dumpsys(self.device, Dumpsys.MEMINFO, pkg))
        self.device.press('BACK')
        time.sleep(0.5)
        self.device.press('BACK')
        time.sleep(0.5)
        self.device.press('HOME')
        time.sleep(0.5)
    self.plot.plot()

With every iteration, we are collecting the dumpsys meminfo for the process, exiting the app by sending BACK and returning to Home, and at the end, we plot the chart.

We can easily see that while we are forcing GC the amount of memory used, the number of Activities and Views are constantly increasing.

As always, you can find more information about AndroidViewClient/culebra in its wiki at https://github.com/dtmilano/AndroidViewClient/wiki, about CulebraTester at http://culebra.dtmilano.com/ and https://github.com/dtmilano/CulebraTester-public/wiki and if you have any question you can ask in Stackoverflow using http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/androidviewclient.

Hope this help you spot some leaks in your app.

AndroidViewClient/culebra vs. MonkeyRunner

More than 2 years ago I took a crucial decision in AndroidViewClient/culebra development plan and that was to free it from `monkeyrunner`, Jython and Chimpchat.

AndroidViewClient/culebra was liberated and starting with version 4.0.0 it does not require any other runtime environment than python 2.x (read announcement). It can be installed and upgraded using the corresponding platform tools like easy_install or pip and can be easily integrated into IDEs like Eclipse PyDev or Pycharm. It also improves speed, solves chimpchat bugs, and even provides a GUI whre you can automatically create tests or scripts without writing a single line of code.

Nonetheless, from time to time, I receive some questions or reports about problems with scripts created with `culebra` that are attempted to run with `monkeyrunner` or some other combinations. I take the blame for it. I failed at communicating that AndroidViewClient/culebra is a complete replacement and should not be used together.

In order to improve the situation I gave a very detailed, easy to follow, step-by-step answer to
Error of Script with MonkeyRunner and AndroidViewClient (Touch) on Stackoverflow, showing how you can create a test case that automatically starts.and Activity (Duolingo) , checks if some Views are on the screen, touches them and finally take the screenshot. All from the GUI.

I hope you find this explanation useful.

AndroidViewClient/culebra 10K/month download mark

I proudly announce that last month we achieved the 10K/month download.

Thank you all collaborator, contributors, testers and users that helped in the creation and evolution of one of the best and most versatile Android automated testing tool.

Since culebra's GUI inception some months ago, we closed the gap between programmers and testers. Even though the auto-generated test scripts are the same as the ones that could be manually created using AndroidViewClient as a library  with the GUI we lowered the bar and the tool can be used even you don't know how to program in python and even if you don't program at all.

In retrospective last months we have seen several fundamental additions, like as I mentioned

• culebra GUI
• multi-device test generation and run capability (more coming soon)
• orientation locked tests
• log test steps to file, screen and adb logcat
• screen and View snapshots with filename generated from pattern
• added WiFiManager to mimic Android device's
• calculation of distance between different View trees
• drag using PX or DIP
• and many, many more

Stay in touch. You comments and suggestions are welcome, and http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/androidviewclient is a great way of getting your questions answered.
Install from pypi, clone from github and read the documentation from the wiki (yes, it's been updated and cleaned up lately, however some still needs some love, anyone?).

See you at the 100K/month post ;-)

AndroidViewClient @ stackoverflow

AndroidViewClient is constantly increasing its popularity and the number of questions I've been receiving through the open channels is very high and sometimes they may be left unanswered or lost.

Fortunately, the tag androidviewclient was added to stackoverflow and this will greatly improve the follow up of any question or problem.

Visit http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/androidviewclient for more details.