iPad iOS 7 memory leak issue

Hi All,

It's a bit of a strange issue this and I am seeing it occur on two different devices - one a 1st Gen iPad Mini 32Gb running 7.1.1, and the other an iPad 2 also running 7.1.1

The issue manifests itself as the device throwing up a popup saying 'Storage Almost Full'.

So checking 'Settings/General/About' shows there's 0Gb Available. That explains the message. However, it doesn't explain why there's no space. I'll elaborate...

If you go into Settings/General/Usage, the 'Storage' shows as 0Gb available. However, there is no music on either device, and neither are there any videos. I deleted them the first time this issue occured. If you total up the column showing the individual apps, it comes to around 8Gb. So that means there's 24Gb being used by 'something' that isn't showing.

So here's the wierd bit (and it happens on both devices). If I hard reboot them (home key + sleep/wake button together till the Apple logo appears), the Apple logo comes on and sits there for a good 5-6 minutes. Ultimately the devices do eventually boot, but they're sluggish in the initial few minutes of use. Putting in the unlock code there is a noticeable lag in response.

Then eventually they settle down and start working. Checking the 'Settings/General/About' now shows 20Gb Available, as does the 'Storage' part of the 'Usage' page. But over time (and not much use - the iPad 2 just sleeps 90% of the time as it has been relegated in favour of a Nexus 7 just for the moment) and in a time period of around a week or so, the issue recurrs. The iPad mini also does it (it's mainly used to play Minecraft by my youngest daughter) in a similar time period.

My theory is that this is, in essence, a BSD UNIX Darwin kernel machine underneath, and as such, something loaded by the iPad as a background process (possibly an App we've both got installed) is using virtual memory to fill up the free space on the storage device. Once I do a reboot, a cleanup process as part of the startup process clears this down and frees up the space. But ultimately it slowly but surely fills up again.

I've also seen it clear down huge amounts of space when deleting apps. I seem to remember deleting one app which was around 10Mb and it freed up 10Gb. Not all at once - it was again an obvious background process that was running that was clearing down items - but repeatedly checking the usage stats on the device you could see the free space rising incrementally over a period of around 15 minutes when it had finished it's processing and became stable.

So my question is this - without Jailbreaking the device, is there any way (like you can with Android 4.4 and Windows Phone 8.1) of enumerating which applications are using up CPU and Memory, including virtual memory? Apple's 'closed ecosystem' approach is good when the apps behave themselves, but I patently have an app somewhere that doesn't behave, and I need to track it down, and thus need to work out which apps are using the CPU cycles.

I noticed that there are logfiles on the device that sends information back to Apple about fairly detailed application statistics (the device obviously collects the same 'CPU/Memory/Virtual Memory/Battery' stats that Android et. al. does, but doesn't report them to the user' so the other option would be does anyone know any packages that parse these logfiles to give you some information about what your device is doing?