Android Performance in Practice

Thursday, December 6th, 2012 at 6:35 pm, Android.
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I recently wrote an article explaining how to track down and fix performance issues in Android application. This article was by no means a complete reference on how to solve all performance issues and focused on a particular set of issues caused by overdraw.

To help you better understand how to fix overdraw issues, I would like to invite you to download a small Android application I wrote (click File > Download to download the entire archieve.)

Your goal will be to use the tools described in my previous article to find and fix the 3 main overdraw issues in the app. If you do it right, you should turn the image on the left to the image on the right:

16 Responses to “Android Performance in Practice”

  1. Gamma says:
    December 7, 2012 at 1:17 am

    Thanks for the previous post, and the practical training !

  2. Marcus Körner says:
    December 7, 2012 at 2:01 am

    I guess the most tricky part is to cut out the nine-patch drawable ;)

  3. Swaminatha Prabhu says:
    December 7, 2012 at 2:27 am

    I have a question. Our team used to strictly obey the Lint warnings. The recent Lint enhancements are awesome.
    For your project, the lint warning reported as below for the file activity_main.xml

    Possible overdraw: Root element paints background @color/dark_background with a theme that also paints a background (inferred theme is @style/AppTheme)

    Going by the above suggestion we achieved the right side image. Now my question(confused), for finding the overdraw which one you suggest?? Lint or the debug methodology you suggested.

  4. FrAndroid DevTips #29 - FrAndroid says:
    December 8, 2012 at 9:44 am

    [...] Afin de vous entrainer à éviter l’effet d’overdraw (redessiner plusieurs fois un composant inutilement), Romain Guy propose un projet d’exemple. [...]

  5. Afzal says:
    December 9, 2012 at 1:09 am

    Hmm…after I finished fixing the 9-patch and set background drawable to null, my ActionBar background had no colour and the text + icon were blue, instead of green. :)

    Thanks for this exercise Romain

  6. Josh Musselwhite says:
    December 9, 2012 at 7:42 pm

    is anyone else having a problem with “getWindow().setBackgroundDrawable(null);” having no effect to the overdraw? It works fine when it’s in the theme but not programmatically in onCreate()

  7. T says:
    December 10, 2012 at 6:29 pm

    Any response to the problem reported about setting windowbackground to @null causing “smearing”? See: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12150761

    Afraid to try it because of that bug report.

  8. amor egypt says:
    December 12, 2012 at 9:15 am

    could you talk about building custom list view from scratch with a high performance

  9. amor egypt says:
    December 12, 2012 at 9:15 am

    could you talk about building custom list view from scratch with a high performance

  10. Afzal says:
    December 12, 2012 at 6:01 pm

    @Josh, I didn’t have a problem with that.

  11. Josh says:
    December 16, 2012 at 4:51 pm

    @Afzal/Anyone, hmmm. I see no difference at all. Do you? getWindow().setBackgroundDrawable(null) seems to have has no affect on overdraw. Sample is below.

    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    getWindow().setBackgroundDrawable(null);
    setContentView(R.layout.main);
    }

    and main.xml is just 2 view containers.

  12. Josh says:
    December 16, 2012 at 4:52 pm

    WP is stripping out the xml… the xml for main.xml is just 2 containers both have a background color. The inner once has 20 dp padding on the left and right so you can see the overdraw layers.

  13. Romain Guy says:
    December 16, 2012 at 4:53 pm

    Call setBackgroundDrawable(null) after setContentView() and see if it helps.

  14. layout taking too much time to load android : Android Community - For Application Development says:
    January 21, 2013 at 4:30 am

    [...] is a really good explanation how can you optimize your UI so it can load faster : Android Performance in Practice by Romain Guy. I suggest you to take a [...]

  15. ursus says:
    February 1, 2013 at 9:29 am

    Will there be a solution published?

  16. he.cao says:
    May 7, 2013 at 3:13 am

    replace @drawable/frame to @drawable/frame_hole in layout/photo_item.xml will do most of the work.

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