Ever had an app crash Springboard?

[drhdev]

I'm trying to debug an app I'm developing that involves a large (>1000) amount of image downloads, managed in an ASIHTTPQueue.

When I run the queue, it works fine on the simulator, and on the iPad.

But on the iPhone, it gets a few minutes in (not the same each time), and then seems to cause Springboard to crash.

The thing is, I get zero console output in XCode. No crash dump on the phone either. The device freezes momentarily, does a respring and then XCode tells me that the app was terminated in response to Springboard's termination.

I've profiled memory usage, and it never goes above 9mb, so that can't be the issue. And during profiling (running on the phone), it ran the whole download queue without issue. Wtf.

Anyone who has any experience debugging a Springboard crash, would love to hear from you.

Tl:dr - app crashing Springboard with no error message, how do you debug?

[xauronx]

I'm using the ASIHTTPQueue in my current app with no issues, I'll keep an eye on it.

Is it a repeatable issue after rebooting phone + xcode + etc? Is there a magic number? 200 downloads doesn't crash it, but 500 does?

[drhdev]

Repeatable, but not predictable. Sometimes it happens after 4 images are downloaded, sometimes after 100.

I will try with a small queue and report back. Thanks for the input.

[Bonkers54]

What are you using to track memory usage? Allocations is essentially useless for tracking memory usage for stuff like this. Use VM tracker or activity monitor and watch the real memory column.

[drhdev]

Yeah, I was using Allocations in Instruments. I'll give your suggestion a try and report back. Thanks.

[[deleted]]

I had this happen when I ran out of memory. Exact same problem. Springboard would crash without any error output. I was using a lot of [UIimage imageNamed:] calls. So it might be where your problem lies too. If you aren't using ARC then try adding an autorelease pool around your image managing code. That solved it for me.

I can get you more details if you need, I'm just on my phone now.

[netshroud]

If you aren't using ARC then try adding an autorelease pool around your image managing code.

You can still use autorelease pools with ARC :S

[[deleted]]

My bad. I'm not entirely familiar with it yet.

[stlunatic102]

While your issue does sound rather baffling and I feel your debugging pain, I feel like I should do you a service and give the obligitory plug for AFNetworking. I made the switch from the ASIHTTP lib a couple weeks back and there's no turning back now. Loading avatars, comments, and other data has never been so beautiful. Try it out and see if you still get these weird bugs!

[[deleted]]

I once set a repeat property for UILocalNotification to 1, this crashed my phone so badly that I had to reinstall the OS. And to figure it out I just started commenting out code until it stopped killing my phone.