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

Chapter 4. Memory

When trying to reach the performance target for our application, memory is the matter to focus on: poorly managed memory in an application can affect the behavior of the whole system. It can also affect the other applications installed on our device in the same way as other applications could affect ours. As we all know, Android has a wide range of devices on the market with a lot of different configurations and memory amounts. It's up to the developers to work out which strategy to take while dealing with this amount of fragmentation, which pattern to follow while developing, and which tools to use to profile the code. This is the aim of this chapter. We will focus on heap memory, while we deal with cache in Chapter 10, Performance Tips.

We will have a look at how our device handles memory, deepening our knowledge of what garbage collection is and how it works in order to understand how to avoid common developing mistakes, and clarify what we will discuss to define best...