Air and mac operating system grinding to a halt

Question

I'm running air applications on Mac Mini computers (predominantly running 10.7.2) and am finding that after a few weeks of running constantly the air app gradually slows down, then grinds to a halt. The applications are dynamic animations that run full screen 1080p - they are artworks that are left on constantly.
It then becomes impossible (or very slow) to quit the air app and the whole computer will respond very slowly or not at all. After this has happened a few times the computer will not even restart and will need the system re-installing.
I've tried running various statistics outputting things, like MR Doobs Hi-Res-Stats - so I can monitor the framerate, memory and children. There are no obvious problems there. The cause of the issue is very hard to debug as it initially takes weeks for this error to occur, though after that it re-occurs more frequently and seems to affect the Mac OS too.
The Mac mini is a 2.5GHz Intel Core i5 with AMDRadeon HD 6630M 256MB graphics. This model does not have automatic graphics switching which i've seen can cause problems.
I am currently upgrading the os and seeing if that will help, but it will probably take weeks of constant running to see a repeat in the issue.

Answer 1

Ive run a test version and checked the memory usage using some open source monitors like the one described above (high res stats). Im no expert with trying to test for memory leaks, but this does give feedback to direct, max direct, total and garbage. After running this air app for a few days the memory remains stable. On my test screen the direct and max direct are around 30 and 45 (i assume its MB).
Theres an image attached with these monitors - this picture is taken with me testing the movie in the flash ide so i believe thats making these values much higher, however they also are remaining stable.
I think the version of air used initially was 2.5 (this is the one thats misbehaving), i've since loaded version 3.1 into my copy of flash CS5.5, i need to run a long test with this version too. The trouble is that problems seem to take weeks to appear. I will be setting up the final version of this mac mini setup to restart automatically every night.
I'm currently testing a version of this film as a flash projector rather than air to see what that does. Please let me know what other tests i can run. I can post the code i'm using - its not that big (200 or so lines)
To explain a bit more about what i'm doing - I work for an artist who makes dynamic (randomised) animations which play on HD screens using Macs and PCs. These will generally be left on all day, some are never turned off, some are. I've seen a few different films recently freeze (fine when its quit and restarted) or in this case slow down to almost 1 frame every 30 seconds and completely break the computer, in some cases requiring the system to be re-installed (the film i'm talking about falls into the latter situation).