Continue on iphone with leaks around UIWebView! Here is another big one with no apparent solution. When we try to release a UIWebView component, very few memory is freed. So any application using this object to display webpages is going to crash quickly with Low memory exception :(

I think this memory usage graph gives an idea on how big is this new king of leak:

1. Create a UIWebView
2. Load http://www.google.com/
3. Release the webview (UIWebView dealloc is correctly called!)
   Look how so few memory is freed :/

Test Application

The leak is all but tiny! Before the loading of the webpage, the application was using 630kB of memory, and after the release of the UIWebview, 1150kB! So we have a 500KB leak in order to simply display the home of Google.com!

This time, I didn’t manage to find any hack to solve this bug.
So if you have any tips to fix this, don’t hesitate to post a comment!

I’ve tried a lot of differents hacks to free more memory (or use less), like:

  // Setup the webview to disable some fancy effect on phone number, but doesn't change anything on memory released ...
  webview.dataDetectorTypes = UIDataDetectorTypeNone;
  webview.allowsInlineMediaPlayback = NO;

or

  // Remove and disable all URL Cache, but doesn't seem to affect the memory
  [[NSURLCache sharedURLCache] removeAllCachedResponses];
  [[NSURLCache sharedURLCache] setDiskCapacity:0];
  [[NSURLCache sharedURLCache] setMemoryCapacity:0];

or

  // Remove all credential on release, but memory used doesn't move!
  NSURLCredentialStorage *credentialsStorage = [NSURLCredentialStorage sharedCredentialStorage];
  NSDictionary *allCredentials = [credentialsStorage allCredentials];
  for (NSURLProtectionSpace *protectionSpace in allCredentials) {
    NSDictionary *credentials = [credentialsStorage credentialsForProtectionSpace:protectionSpace];
    for (NSString *credentialKey in credentials) {
      [credentialsStorage removeCredential:[credentials objectForKey:credentialKey] forProtectionSpace:protectionSpace];
    }
  }

or

  // Cleanup the HTML document by removing all content
  // This time, this hack free some additional memory on some websites, mainly big ones with a lot of content
  [webview stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:@"document.body.innerHTML='';"];

But I never reach complete release of memory used by the web component :(