Leaking memory in iOS

I ran the instruments 'Leaks' tool to test if my app has any leaks, and it showed me that I have some leaks. I'm not an expert at fixing leaks, I was wondering if

I have a leak, and
What I should do to fix it.

You would appear to have a leak, but it looks modest. You can click on the little arrows next to the memory address and it should take you a screen in which you can drill in and see where that memory was allocated, which is the first step in figuring out why it wasn't deallocated. (I'd start the non-malloc objects, as more often they map more directly to your code and it's easier to diagnose).

But sometimes you'll see modest leaks like this which are, as Mike Robinson said, false positives. And even if it's not a false positive, it could be coming from the OS, itself, not your code. So we sometimes go through an exercise of really stressing the app (e.g. repeatedly running through the portion of the app that seemed to generate the leak) to see how rapidly the leak grows, if at all. It looks like your your leak might add up to less than 1 kilobyte or so, and doesn't continue to grow, you might choose to not worry about it. (Or at least once you've satisfied yourself that there's nothing in your code that causes it.)

Personally, though, I'm less concerned about these modest leaks than the significant growth in overall memory usage. It might just be an appropriate caching of images, or it might be a sign of some abandoned memory (which leaks tool won't show you). I'd try simulating memory warning and see how much of that memory is recovered. You can also drag across the timeline and go to the allocations view, and you can see what accounts for that memory consumption. You might want to make sure you don't have some deeper memory problem unrelated to the modest leaks reported by "Leaks" tool. Not all memory problems appear in "Leaks": The "Allocations" growth can also indicate problems, and I'd be a little worried that you're not seeing your memory usage drop down to some steady-state level.

Apple shared an example allocation graph, advising us to watch out for the red "wasted" memory. The warmup portion is not so critical, nor is the intermediate level (as long as it's not too high), but the growth of the steady state level is indication of a more serious memory problem:

In your case, I'm not seeing the app return to a steady state at all, which is why I'm a tad concerned. But I'm not sure how much you exercised the app or whether you gave it a chance to return to that steady-state.

If you watch (the somewhat dated, yet still relevant) WWDC 2013 Fixing Memory Issues, it will arm you with tools and techniques for diagnosing and resolving memory issues. It is where the above chart came from and describes it in greater detail. Note, the PDF presentation is nice, but the video is much better, as it includes some practical demonstrations for using Instruments. The WWDC 2012 iOS App Performance: Memory is also good. (It looks like there might be problems streaming the videos, but it looks like you can still download it.)