Memory leak while using admob interstitial ads

[Venkatramanan]

I have service which will show an activity at particular point of time, after that activity on every 13th time i am showing an admob interstitial ads. My application's RAM usage is increasing by 20MB when the interstitial ad is shown and after that it is not getting garbage collected. On the next 13th time when another interstitial ads is shown there is no increase in the service memory.

My code for showing ads :

public void loadAndShowInterstitialAd() {
        interstitial = new InterstitialAd(getApplicationContext());
        interstitial.setAdUnitId(AD_UNIT_ID);

        final AdRequest adRequest = new AdRequest.Builder()
                .build();

        Handler handler = new Handler(new Handler.Callback() {

            @Override
            public boolean handleMessage(Message msg) {
                interstitial.loadAd(adRequest);
                return true;
            }
        });

        if (handler != null) {
            handler.sendEmptyMessageDelayed(0, 200);
        }

        interstitial.setAdListener(new AdListener() {
            @Override
            public void onAdLoaded() {
                super.onAdLoaded();
                displayInterstitial();
            }

        });
    }

    public void displayInterstitial() {
        if (interstitial.isLoaded()) {
            interstitial.show();
        }
    }

I have tried few solutions in the following stack overflow questions, but nothing worked for me.

Android Admob Interstitial Memory leak

Android AdMob causes memory leak?

Please help me to fix this issue. Thanks in advance.

Regards,

Venkat.

[Eric Leichtenschlag]

Hi Venkat,

From your first line of code, I see your class holds onto the Interstitial object. So if you're keeping your class around, then the interstitial wouldn't get garbage collected. What happens if you null out the interstitial in the onAdClosed event of your AdListener implementation:

      @Override

      public void onAdClosed() {

        interstitial = null;

      }

Thanks,
Eric

[Venkatramanan]

Hi Eric,

There is no change in memory leak even after putting interstitial ad to null in the onAdClosed.

    @Override

      public void onAdClosed() {

        interstitial = null;

      }

Is there any other solution to this issue?

Thanks & Regards,

Venkat.

[Eric Leichtenschlag]

I don't have any other recommendations.

Can you provide more information on how you're inspecting ram usage, and what you're seeing increase? I tried:

adb shell dumpsys meminfo <your.app.package>

I ran this before and after requesting interstitials, in both cases with setting the interstitial to null and not setting it to null. Setting it to null helped for me. The total memory used after showing and nulling an interstitial was a little higher than it was before I requested any ads, but that's likely due to the SDK caching some stuff to make future requests faster.

Thanks,
Eric

[Venkatramanan]

Hi Eric,

How much size will be increased usually when you don't use interstitial = null?

Regards,

Venkat.

[Eric Leichtenschlag]

Here's what I'm getting from the interstitial sample app on a Nexus 5. When I checked today, there wasn't any significant difference when setting to null.

Before request: 34670 KB

After closing interstitiall: 53964 KB

So also about 20 MB...

[Venkat Google Account]

How to garbage collect that 20 MB? Is it a new bug in Google Play services?

Regards,

Venkat.

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[Eric Leichtenschlag]

Looks like that's the overhead of spinning up a WebView for the first time. If I run:

WebView webView = new WebView(this);
webView.loadUrl("http://www.google.com"); // or some website that doesn't redirect
webView = null;

in my app, memory also increases by 20 MB. Since the SDK uses WebView's, and I imagine most if not all ads SDKs do, there isn't much that can be done.

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[Venkatramanan]

If it is the case, if users have more apps which uses admob then their phone's RAM usage will be high and it will cause issues for them and us. It is a serious issue. Isn't it?

Regards,

Venkat.

[Eric Leichtenschlag]

I haven't tried what happens when you open up several apps with AdMob at the same time. But the same behavior would happen with everyone app uses a WebView to to send or load data to a backend.

Android handles memory issues by stopping applications running in the background when memory is low.