(LibGDX | SOLVED) Memory Leak/Issue With ShaderProgram

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#1

Hi, I’ve noticed a dip in performance as time goes on in my game and decided to boot up JConsole and MAT (eclipse memory analyzer). To my surprise and from what I can see (I’m not very informed when it comes to memory), none of my classes seemed to be the suspect in leaking memory; the culprit was LibGDX’s ShaderProgram.

I’m not sure if I’m suppose to interact with the class, but so far in my code I have not referenced it. I did a quick google search if there have been any problems with it- nothing showed up. I went deeper and checked out what references ShaderProgram to see if I’m referencing it indirectly, and I found that SpriteBatches have a method to create a default ShaderProgram. But I don’t call it.

Here’s what MAT spit out for its suspect:

797×776 29.6 KB

Here’s the dominator tree:

798×786 71 KB

I still have the heap up in MAT if you have further inquiries.

TL;DR LibGDX’s ShaderProgram class is leaking memory (one time it got up to 1.5GB)

#2

I’m not familiar with that program, but are you sure you’re interpreting this correctly? Isn’t it saying that there are a crapload of ShaderProgram objects, and they’re all stored in a single Object[]? Wouldn’t that simply mean that you may be loading shaders, throwing them on an ArrayList somewhere and forgetting about them, preventing them from being garbage collected?

#3

Oh yeah I was. What I meant was that I never used ShaderPrograms or stored them anywhere. I actually don’t even have any Object arrays.

Anyway, I resolved the issue by mistake. After dividing my rendering tasks into more evenly grouped SpriteBatches the memory leak disappeared. Sorry for a very vague solution, but that’s what I did.