[danabramov]

If I could give advice to myself when I started writing production code in MonoTouch without any experience with it, it would be: “Don't Guess. Profile.”

For example, I spent a lot of time making sure I don't load heavy .NET objects, but most memory crashes went away when I started using JPG instead of PNG pictures in a picture-heavy app.

Then it got a lot better when I took time to learn about best iOS practices such as keeping a pool of about ten reusable views and re-filling them with new content as they go offscreen when the user is scrolling, instead of creating hundreds of views at once. What is really nice, iOS6 UICollectionView class enforces this memory usage pattern by providing a neat API with view pool. Use it instead of rolling out your own collection view.

Another hard lesson was to never block UI thread and do any computational intensive stuff such as parsing JSON in .NET Tasks on another thread. This is obvious in retrospect, but I thought parsing JSON wasn't intensive. It was.

Finally, if your app crashes randomly, it's most probably your fault! I really need to stress it because I fell into this trap, thinking MonoTouch is buggy when my app crashed every minute. Turned out, it had insane memory leaks and aggressively allocated large amounts of memory at once—but I didn't bother to learn about “right” techniques until it was too late. Learn to profile early so you don't panic later.

[jbigelow76]

Thank you for taking the time to provide these tips and links. Lots of good info here that I'm sure I'll be referring back to in the not too distant future.

[danabramov]

Sure—if you have any questions feel free to ping me at [e-mail]