How to take heap snapshot of Xamarin.Android's Mono VM?

Question

Background: I am trying to track down a memory leak in a Xamarin.Android app. Using DDMS and Eclipse Memory Profiler, I am able to see which objects are alive. When trying to tr

Answer 1

I have been having troubles with Xamarin Android memory profiling, and have used a few tricks:

1. On the Dalvik side I have used Android Monitor to dump a heap snapshot and then opening it with JProfiler or Eclipse MAT. This standard Android.

2. A large portion of my code is shared (70-80%) and to verify this I have built a simple WinForms application to drive the shared API. This way I can use .Net Memory Profiler (or ANTS if you would prefer) as well as dotTrace for performance. I could easily pick quite a few issues this way.

3. By using the solution explained by @jnop above I could open the profile.mldp in Mono's HeapShot tool and get a visual tool instead of the mprof-report textual output.

By the way used should vote for better profilers: http://xamarin.uservoice.com/forums/144858-xamarin-suggestions/suggestions/3229534-add-memory-and-performance-profiler