This is going to be a multi-part series on how to debug an iPhone crash.
This post is for how to debug crashes that show that the app received the signal EXC_BAD_ACCESS in the console. If you have this, the most likely thing that you are doing is sending a message to a released object. Another possibility is if you are using C/C++ allocations (or a library that uses it) and are overrunning memory or using freed memory.
Update: I explain this much better in a follow-up to this blog
Here are a few ways to debug that:
- Run Build and Analyze: This kind of Build is very good at finding retain/release bugs. Take a good look at everything it flags.
- Even better, run scan-build. I did a test recently, and found that some common errors are off by default in Build and Analyze that can be turned on in scan-build.
- Choose Run > Enable Guard Malloc in the menu, and then re-run your application. This finds a whole class of buffer overrun issues. If this detects it, you’ll see a better error in the console. Read this to see how to use Guard Malloc once it’s enabled.
- You can instruct the compiler to ignore release calls and then report if anyone is sending messages to objects that would have been deallocated. This results in much better errors in the Console if it detects them.
- Valgrind is the gold standard for finding memory bugs on Linux, and here’s a way to get it working in the iPhone Simulator.
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