I was struggling with a bug in my latest iPhone application, and frankly i got very frustrated with retain-release concept. I missed good old ( well, not that old ) garbage collector, but following code helped me a lot in understanding the release-retain cycle and getting the backtrace of whats actually going on.

First of all include following files in the code :

#include <execinfo.h>
#include <stdio.h>

and then add following lines to the implementation file (.m) :

- (void)release {
	void* callstack[128];
	int i, frames = backtrace(callstack, 128);
	char** strs = backtrace_symbols(callstack, frames);
	for (i = 0; i < frames; ++i) {
		printf("%s\n", strs[i]);
	}
	free(strs);
	NSLog(@"retainCount = %d", [self retainCount]);
	[super release];
}

Now, look at the console, you will see nice backtrace of release-retain cycle. Hope this helps somebody.

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