Memory leak leads to crash when Safari Web Inspector attached to UIWebView

Originator:michael.melanson
Number:rdar://15232050 Date Originated:15-Oct-2013
Status:Insufficient information Resolved:
Product:iOS / Safari Product Version:
Classification: Reproducible:
 
Summary:
When Safari's remote Web Inspector is connected to a UIWebView on an iOS device, it causes the UIWebView to retain memory when the web view repeatedly requests the same resource. Eventually, the available memory is exhausted and the application crashes.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open a page in a UIWebView which repeatedly requests an image (image/jpeg) resource. The image may be uncacheable (Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate; Pragma: no-cache; Expires: 0).
2. Attach Instruments to the application with an Allocations instrument. 
3. Attach Safari's remote Inspector to the UIWebView.
4. Wait.

Expected Results:
Memory usage remains flat over time. No crash is observed.

Actual Results:
After step 2, memory usage is flat. After step 3, it begins to increase in a sawtooth pattern. Eventually, several low memory warnings are issued then the application crashes.


Version:
iOS 7.0.2; Safari 6.0.5; Instruments 5.0 (51166). Also reproducible in iOS Simulator 7.0 (463.9.4).

Notes:
Closing the Safari web inspector window releases the extra memory.

Configuration:
UIWebView must be configured to allow the remote debugger (developer extras).

Comments

Apple requested a crash log on 17-Oct-2014. Not sure why...

I haven't gotten around to producing one for them yet.

By michael.melanson at Nov. 19, 2014, 2:58 p.m. (reply...)

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