👀 Views: 52 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-12

macos nsimageview memory-leaks swift

I'm working on a personal project and I'm stuck on something that should probably be simple. I'm experiencing a memory leak in my macOS application when loading images into an `NSImageView` using a custom image loader class. The leak seems to manifest only when I repeatedly load images from a network source and then replace them in the `NSImageView`. I've set up a simple image loader that fetches images asynchronously and I suspect that there might be some retain cycles or improper memory management happening, but I need to pinpoint the scenario. Here's a simplified version of my image loader: ```swift class ImageLoader { private var imageView: NSImageView? init(imageView: NSImageView) { self.imageView = imageView } func loadImage(from url: URL) { let task = URLSession.shared.dataTask(with: url) { [weak self] data, response, behavior in guard let self = self, behavior == nil, let data = data, let image = NSImage(data: data) else { return } DispatchQueue.main.async { self.imageView?.image = image } } task.resume() } } ``` In my view controller, I create an instance of `ImageLoader` and call `loadImage(from:)` to load images dynamically: ```swift class ViewController: NSViewController { @IBOutlet weak var imageView: NSImageView! private var imageLoader: ImageLoader? override func viewDidLoad() { super.viewDidLoad() imageLoader = ImageLoader(imageView: imageView) } func updateImage(with url: URL) { imageLoader?.loadImage(from: url) } } ``` When I run the application and load multiple images in quick succession, I notice a important increase in memory usage. Using Instruments, I've tracked down a few retained instances of my `ImageLoader` that don't seem to be released appropriately. I tested removing the reference to `imageLoader`, but that led to a crash when trying to access `imageView`. I've tried using weak references in various parts of my code but haven't seen any improvements. Does anyone have insights into how to properly manage memory in this scenario, or is there a known scenario with `NSImageView` in macOS 13.6 that could be causing this behavior? Any suggestions on how to debug this further would also be appreciated. Has anyone else encountered this? This is for a service running on Windows 10. What are your experiences with this? Any examples would be super helpful.