Memory leaks in Appcelerator Android HTTP? - appcelerator

Question

I am running into what looks like a memory leak on Android using Appcelerator. I am making an HTTP GET call repeatedly until all data is loaded. This call happens about 50 times, for a total of roughly 40 MB of JSON. I am seeing the memory usage spike dramatically if this is executed. If I execute these GETs the heap size (as reported by Android Device Monitor, the preferred method to check memory according to the official Appcelerator docs) gets up to ~240 MB and stays there for as long as the app runs. If I do not execute these GETs, it only uses about 50 MB. I don't think this is a false heap reading either, because if I execute the GETs again (from page 1) I run out of memory.
I have looked through the code and cannot find any obvious leaks, such as storing all results in a global variable or something. Are the HTTP responses being cached somewhere?
Here is my code, for reference. syncThings(1, 20) (sanitized name :) ) gets called during startup. It in turn calls a helper function syncDocuments(). Here are the two functions. Don't worry about launchMainWindow() unless you think it could be relevant, but assume it does no cleanup.
function syncThings(page, itemsPerPage) {
var url = "the_url";
console.log("Getting page " + page);
syncDocuments(url,
function(response) {
if (response.totalDocumentsInQuery == itemsPerPage) {
// More pages to get
setTimeout(function() {
syncThings(page + 1, itemsPerPage);
}, 1);
} else {
// This was the last page
launchMainWindow();
}
},
function(e) {
Ti.API.error('Default error callback called for syncThings;', e);
dispatcher.trigger('app:update:stop');
});
}
function syncDocuments(url, successCallback, errorCallback) {
new HTTPRequest({
url: url,
method: 'GET',
headers: {
'Content-Type': 'application/json'
},
timeout: 30000,
success: function (response) {
Ti.API.info('Success callback called for ' + url);
successCallback(response);
},
error: function (error) {
errorCallback(error);
}
}).send();
}
Any ideas? Am I doing something wrong here?
Edit: I am using Titanium SDK 6.0.1.GA. This happens on all Android versions.

Answer 1

Try using the file-property of the HTTPClient: http://docs.appcelerator.com/platform/latest/#!/api/Titanium.Network.HTTPClient-property-file
otherwise the file will be loaded into memory.
There will be a memory leak fix in 6.1.0: https://github.com/appcelerator/titanium_mobile/pull/8818 that might fix something too.