Book Image

Android High Performance Programming

By : Emil Atanasov, Enrique López Mañas, Diego Grancini
Book Image

Android High Performance Programming

By: Emil Atanasov, Enrique López Mañas, Diego Grancini

Overview of this book

Performant applications are one of the key drivers of success in the mobile world. Users may abandon an app if it runs slowly. Learning how to build applications that balance speed and performance with functionality and UX can be a challenge; however, it's now more important than ever to get that balance right. Android High Performance will start you thinking about how to wring the most from any hardware your app is installed on, so you can increase your reach and engagement. The book begins by providing an introduction to state–of-the-art Android techniques and the importance of performance in an Android application. Then, we will explain the Android SDK tools regularly used to debug and profile Android applications. We will also learn about some advanced topics such as building layouts, multithreading, networking, and security. Battery life is one of the biggest bottlenecks in applications; and this book will show typical examples of code that exhausts battery life, how to prevent this, and how to measure battery consumption from an application in every kind of situation to ensure your apps don’t drain more than they should. This book explains techniques for building optimized and efficient systems that do not drain the battery, cause memory leaks, or slow down with time.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Android High Performance Programming
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Dalvik Debug Monitor Server


Dalvik Debug Monitor Server is also known as DDMS. This utility runs on top of adb, and provides a graphical interface with a big set of functionalities, including thread and heap information, logcat, SMS/call simulation, location data, and more. This is how DDMS looks when it starts:

The screen has different sections:

  1. The top-left section shows the active devices and the different processes running on the device.

  2. The top-right section shows a variety of options, the default option being the file explorer. At the bottom, LogCat is shown.

There are more available options in the DDMS, so let's explore them in detail. First, the section we saw on the top-left side:

  1. The icon starts debugging the selected process.
  2. The icon will update the heap every time the GC is triggered for the selected process (more information on this later).
  3. The next icon, , dumps HPROF in a file. HPROF is a binary format that contains the snapshot of an application heap. There are some tools...