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

GPU profiler


The GPU profiler is also an experimental tool included in Android Studio 2.0. This tool aims to help us understand what has caused a particular problem in a rendering outcome, and to inspect the GPU's state.

The GPU debugging tools (where the GPU profiler is included) are not installed by default. To do this, we need to install them from the SDK tools section of the SDK manager.

To use this profiler within our application, we need to load the trace library in our application. We can do this either in our Java code or in our C++ code (something that makes sense, if we consider that a lot of the code used for graphics runs in C++ due to its better performance). Regardless of which method you use, you need to copy the library into your project to be loaded. The libraries will be located in <sdkDir>/extras/android/gapid/android/<abi>/libgapii.so.

We also need to copy some other relevant folders into the jniLibs directory. This can be found in <projectDir>/app/src...