A few weeks ago, I gave a talk about Android Performance Optimization, at Droidcon NYC.
I invested a lot of time in this presentation, since I wanted to show real examples for performance issues, and how to identify them with the available tools. I had to cut down about a half of my slides because I didn’t have enough time to show everything. In this post, I’ll summarize everything I was talking about, and show examples I didn’t have time to go over.
The talk was recorded and you can watch it here:
The slides are also available:
Now, Let’s go over some of the important things I was talking about, hopefully I can give a deeper explanation for everything, starting with the basic rules I follow when I work on optimizations:
My Rules
Everytime I approach a performance problem, or looking for performance problems, I follow these rules:
Always Measure - Optimizing with your eyes is never a good idea. After looking at the same animation for a few times, you’ll start imagining it’s running faster. Numbers don’t lie. Use the tools we’ll go over soon, and measure how your app performs a few times before and after you make your change.
Use slow devices - If you really want to expose all the weak spots, slower devices will help you more. Newer and stronger devices might not get too excited about performance issues you may have, but not all your users use the latest and greatest.
Trade-offs - Performance optimization is all about trade-offs. You optimize one thing - it comes on the expense of another. In many cases, that other thing can be your time spent finding and fixing it, but it can also be the quality of your bitmaps or the amount of data you should store in a specific data structure. Prepare yourself to make sacrifices.
Systrace
Systrace is one of the greatest tools that you probably don’t use. That’s because developers weren’t sure what to do with the information it provides.
Systrace shows us an overview of what’s currently running on the phone. This tool reminds us that the phone we hold in our hands, is actually is a powerful computer that can do many things at the same time. In one of the latest SDK tools updates, this tool was improved with generated insights from the data, helping us to find problems. Let’s see how a trace file looks like:
