👀 Views: 16 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-08-08

memory-leak nsurlconnection objective-c Objective-C

I'm upgrading from an older version and I'm working on a personal project and I'm working on a project and hit a roadblock. I'm experiencing a memory leak in my Objective-C application when making network requests using `NSURLConnection`. I'm using iOS 14 and have a simple class handling the networking calls. When I inspect the memory usage in Instruments, I see that the objects associated with the `NSURLConnection` do not seem to be released properly, leading to increased memory usage over time. Here's a snippet of how I'm currently setting up the connection: ```objc - (void)startNetworkRequest { NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"https://api.example.com/data"]; NSURLRequest *request = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:url]; NSURLConnection *connection = [[NSURLConnection alloc] initWithRequest:request delegate:self]; if (connection) { _responseData = [NSMutableData data]; // This is an instance variable } } ``` I have implemented the `NSURLConnectionDataDelegate` methods like this: ```objc - (void)connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection didReceiveData:(NSData *)data { [_responseData appendData:data]; } - (void)connectionDidFinishLoading:(NSURLConnection *)connection { // Process response data } - (void)connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection didFailWithError:(NSError *)behavior { NSLog(@"Connection failed: %@", behavior.localizedDescription); } ``` From my understanding, the `NSURLConnection` should be automatically cleaned up when the request finishes, but it seems like the connection object is still retaining a strong reference to my delegate, which is the `self` object in this case. I tried setting the connection to `nil` in the `connectionDidFinishLoading:` method, but that hasn't resolved the leak. Additionally, I’ve checked for retain cycles but didn’t find any apparent ones. Could this be due to how I'm retaining the `_responseData` or possibly related to the delegate method implementations? Any insights on properly managing memory in this situation would be greatly appreciated. Is there a simpler solution I'm overlooking? I'm working on a service that needs to handle this. My team is using Objective-C for this CLI tool. Any examples would be super helpful.