How to Fix an Addressables Handle Leak From Not Releasing Loaded Assets

Your Addressables memory grows every time you load content because each load adds a reference that you never release. The bundle stays resident until its count hits zero. Here is how to balance it.

How to fix it

1. Keep and release every handle

Store the AsyncOperationHandle from each LoadAssetAsync and call Addressables.Release(handle) when you are finished. An unreleased handle keeps the reference count up and pins the bundle in memory.

2. Release instances, not just handles

Objects created with InstantiateAsync must be freed with Addressables.ReleaseInstance(go). Calling Destroy on them decrements nothing, so the underlying asset's refcount stays elevated.

3. Balance loads and releases one-to-one

Loading the same key twice increments the count twice, so it needs two releases. Audit that every load path has a matching release path, including error and early-exit cases.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every Unity error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.