What are the best tools to detect memory leaks in casino game apps?

Fortunately, if you’re trying to catch memory leaks in gambling games – particularly those built on Unity or Unreal – you’ll have access to both excellent embedded profilers and third-party software. With Unity, there’s its Memory Profiler, which can capture all memory allocations and live object countings, and its Garbage Collection view, which makes it easy to identify memory objects that are being unnecessarily created and destroyed on fast-animated games that feature spinning reels. I also leverage Unity’s IL2CPP for profiling native memory.

Memory Validator: Unreal's amazing built-in tool that will help you identify leaks in your Card Shuffle algorithm or Slot Machine Reel animation. Both engines have excellent support for LeakCanary (on Android) and Instruments (on iOS), so we'll use them as well to provide us with cross-platform leak detection.

My personal favorite? Unity Profiler. It's simple and powerful for real-time analysis. Play a couple Texas Hold’em matches or spin the reels for a while, and you’ll quickly see the tell-tale memory blips associated with leaks. Throw some manual code inspection into the mix for object pooling, and you’re set. The tricky aspect about casino game memory leaks is that they are not that hard to find.

In Unity, the Profiler window is good enough to show these spikes and track object counts. But to find more complex leaks, use the Memory Profiler or commercial plugins such as Burst or Jobs, which can reveal problems in multi-threaded code, a common source of leaks in my industry. In Unreal, the Memory Sanitizer and Unreal’s Memory Viewer work well, but again I tend to reach for Visual Studio’s diagnostic tools. It’s easy and cheap, so you don’t need to get a separate license for each game developer.