Detect Memory Leaks with LeakCanary

We adopted LeakCanary the day it was released but we don't find it useful at all. In fact, it makes the app almost unusable for us. Every 2-3 mins, it would just freeze the app to capture a heap dump. As our app is quite complicated with a big memory footprint, this just aggravates the problem. I just hope it was more usable.

I've found LeakCanary incredibly useful at rooting out context related leaks you probably wouldn't otherwise think of.

If you look under "no-op dependency" you'll find a solution to the issue you're describing.

I've found it useful to have a leak canary specific build flavor or type, which only I ever see. For all other debug / production build leak canary is not initialized.

"That's terrible, and no one should do that." I find that I really enjoy talks that go through some of the antipatterns before showing the way they are showing off. It both helps build a pattern match of when I should be thinking about their solution, as well as being entertaining.

I heard Pierre give a talk about LeakCanary at Square this summer. It's an impressive tool and I'm already seeing it become a standard recommendation from Google engineers and DevRel people. Props to Square for another awesome open-source offering.