Testing on iPhone 12 mini, I have encountered a weird situation. I am try to take snapshot of my view, which works fine but the memory is never released after the snapshot is taken. func screenshot(view: UIView, scale:Double) -> URL? { guard let containerView = view.superview, let containerSuperview = containerView.superview else { return nil } let rendererFormat = UIGraphicsImageRendererFormat() rendererFormat.scale = scale var renderer = UIGraphicsImageRenderer(bounds: containerView.frame, format: rendererFormat) let image = autoreleasepool { return renderer.image { context in containerSuperview.drawHierarchy(in: containerSuperview.layer.frame, afterScreenUpdates: true) //memory hog starts from here } } guard let data = image.heicData() else { return nil } //more code to save data to file URL and return it } initially it appears to work normally but as soon as I change the scale: rendererFormat.scale = 10 I can see a spike in memory but the problem is then the memory is never released even after the image is saved. so initially, the app uses: 35MB memory -> when processing the memory usage jumps to expected 250MB to 300MB to process large image -> after processing the memory goes down to around 90MB to 120MB but it never really returns to it's original 35MB state. Is this a bug or this is expected? If this is expected behaviour then is there any low level API to free the memory after it's job is done.