iOS Storyboard Modal Segues and Memory

Question

My apps "short" description:

Basically an interactive storybook, I have a class that sets up a audio session and audio player which every other class(ViewControllers) in my app imports and calls a function or two to set the right sound to be played each time something happens(for instance.. user reads the story). Each ViewController has it's own .m and .h classes and uses them for animations and action handling. My app is only about 60 mb's in size (audio/images/code).

Now these ViewControllers are set up in a storyboard (they are 13 now) and are modal segued from one to the next one and then programmatically dismissed to go back.

When I run my app on my iPad now, I'm starting to get memory warnings and yes Instruments is showing me that my app is adding roughly about 40 Mb's for every ViewController that I segue to.

My questions are:

1. Do they reside in real memory no matter what I do? (I thought I wasn't holding any strong pointers to these view controllers).
2. Is there an easy way for me to dismiss one controller and still use a modal segue to get to the next one?(ran into troubles trying this)
3. Modal Segues are probably not the way I should be doing things in my App are they?!. They looked so nice and easy for my "storybook", but now they are giving me a very rough time.
4. Any other tips you can give me from what I described are appreciated.

Thank you.

Answer 1

1. Yes, as long as you present it modally. The presenter view controller keeps a strong pointer to the presented view controller. What you could do here is in the viewWillDisappear: release all the images and other views that might use memory !
2. You could instantiate your view controller using the method instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier: and then presentViewController:animated:completion: like you would do with any view controller
3. It's up to you to decide. But you could easily mimic the animation if you wanted to.
4. If I understood everything correctly I would go with a singleton class kinda like 'AudioEngine' which is accessible from anywhere in any class. Then I would design all my viewcontrollers in my storyboard like you did. When I need to present modally another view controller, I'll do it using the answer of your 2nd question. If I still had a memory issue, I would try to cheat and keeps always 3 view controllers (like we do with the UIScrollView's infinite scroll) that I would reuse and I'll mimic the modal presentation using UIView's animation blocks.