Unreferenced Combine publishers remain in memory after playback

[defagos]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched existing issues and found no similar bug report.

Description of the problem

When observing the memory profile of the app with Instruments, filtering allocations for Combine, we can observe that player-item-related publishers remain alive and increase with each playback. A bit of emory is leaked with each.

Relevant stack trace or log output

None

Reproducibility

Always

Steps to reproduce

1. Run the demo app with Instruments and the Allocations tool.
2. Filter allocations using Combine as keyword.
3. Play content and close the player. Publishers are leaked.
4. Play other content again and close the player. The alive count increases by 1.

Library version

15.0.0

Operating system

Any

Code sample

None

[defagos]

This occurs because we use static publishers as trigger/signal in player items, so that we can loosely request an item to be loaded from its id.

If we could revisit this mechanism we could fix the leak.