Using dismissModalViewControllerAnimated won't free any memory

Question

I have a very simple code to show a modal controller (nextController is a class member):

nextController = [[InstructionsScreen alloc] initWithNibName:@"InstructionsScreen" bundle:nil];
[self presentModalViewController:nextController animated:YES];
[nextController release];

And then when the controller should hide:

[self dismissModalViewControllerAnimated:YES];
nextController = nil;

All works good as expected, but when I run instrument Object Allocations it shows that after dismissing the modal controller the memory it allocated is not freed. This becomes a problem because when I show several controllers the memory is over ...

Can anybody give me some clues ? Clang doesn't see any problems, so I'm stuck hitting the memory limit, because the memory of the dismissed controllers won't get released.

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EDIT: What I discovered up to now is that it seems to be a leak somewhere in Apple's stuff. Way to reproduce: XCode -> create new project with the template "Utility application". Don't write any code yourself. Just create a new utility application and run it with "Object allocations", choose to see "Created & Still living". Now flip the modal controller few times - you'll see the allocated memory only grows and grows every time the modal controller is appearing and when it's disappearing too ...

Answer 1

There is no leak in the code you show as far as I can see. There could be a leak in InstructionsScreen that would prevent it being deallocated.

I think it's worth running the Static Analyser to see if it finds a leak.

The leak in the Apple template code is interesting. It could be that there is a leak. It seems unlikely but obviously it's not impossible. I would say that it's more likely that it's a false-positive in Instruments, which is why I'd suggest using the Static Analyser.

(You might want to raise a bug report about the leak.)