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

Debugging tools


Knowing what a memory leak and a memory churn are and what strategies we can pursue to avoid them, we now need to know how we can find them and how we can profile our code from a memory perspective.

As we have mentioned several times in this chapter, we must always keep an eye on the amount of heap memory used by our application processes, trying to keep it as low as possible and to free resources as much as possible while checking the garbage collector's behavior. Our application needs to be able to stay together with other applications on devices with the most varied amounts of RAM. Therefore, keeping that in mind, we will focus on helpful tools able to analyze the memory usages and we will know how to read common logs related to garbage collection.

LogCat

The simplest tool to start with is surely LogCat, which is used to print messages that inform us about memory trends and garbage collection events. Every message related to memory in LogCat has the same format depending...