Hello. I am debugging a weird memory management error and I can’t figure it out. I noticed that some of my objects are staying in memory longer than expected. I checked all my memory management and finally got to the very improbable conclusion that some of my autorelease operations don’t result in a release. Under what circumstances is that possible? I created a small testing Canary class that logs a message in dealloc and have the following testing code in place:

NSLog(@"On the main thread: %i.", [NSThread isMainThread]);
[[[Canary alloc] init] autorelease];

According to the code we’re really on the main thread, but the dealloc in Canary does not get called until much later. The delay is not deterministic and can easily take seconds or more. How is that possible? The application runs on a Mac, the garbage collection is turned off (Objective-C Garbage Collection is set to Unsupported on the target.) I am mostly used to iOS, is memory management on OS X different in some important way?