General Android Memory leaks and specifically google analytics tracker

I have a couple quick questions. They all deal with 1 general topic, and one strategy may take care of everything, so I hope that its ok I put them under the same topic.

I have had trouble finding solid info on garbage collection, so would appreciate any help, I think perhaps I don't fully understand what I am reading in the MAT. Even if you can answer 1 question I would be super happy

1. What is the best strategy for finding memory leaks in Android? As best I can tell it is to get the Eclipse MAT, picking an object that isn't getting garbage collected (using the dominator tree, or whatever is easiest for you to find it with), and displaying the shortest merged paths to the gc of that object and find the furthest incoming reference to that object that you can control and killing that reference on destroy. This works to kill the references, but sometimes the object still doesn't get garbage collected

2. Is it good practice to null all of your handlers/runnables/threads/listeners on destroy? Some of these seem to stick around indefinitely if I don't, and sometimes even if I do.

3. What is the best way to ensure that a thread gets garbage collected, even if the reference is nulled (they seem to stick around sometimes)?

4. Why o开发者_开发问答h why can't I get the google analytics tracker to get garbage collected, even though it has no reference from my application at all. It seems to maintain a reference to my activity, so I think that might have something to do with my GC problems.

Thanks you!

1. The best strategy is to fully understand the implications of what you are doing from the beginning, and thus avoid memory leaks in the first place. See, for example, handling memory leaks in Java. Otherwise, that seems like a fine approach along with code inspection. Are you forcing a GC to prove that the object still isn't collected?

2. In general, no. This article has a good explanation as to why.

3. Don't hold any references to it? Follow standard coding practices as described above.

4. Don't know. But wouldn't you be using it throughout your application, so it doesn't really matter? Eventually Android will kill your whole process and reclaim the memory anyways.