Reducing Memory FootPrint Of Android App - android

I have been trying to reduce memory usage of the app.
It seems the memory allocation is not an issue as the heap shows allocation of 8mb out of 54mb being used.
Majority of the memory is consumed by code and native section, which doesnt seem right at all. I dont know how to go about it as allocation is not a problem as it seems.
Any help is most Welcome.

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Does increasing RAM help to prevent OOM?

OOM happens when the heap gets full. But what if we increased the size of the RAM of the device, will that help prevent OOM?
I tried to look at tutorials on how to prevent OOM , which recommended multi-threading and trimming down the size of the bitmap. But I still get OOM errors.
But what if we increased the size of the RAM on the device, will that help prevent OOM?
Yes and no. The answer is "it depends on why you are running out of memory."
If you are trying to manipulate a 2GB Bitmap on a 1GB device, then yes, adding a few extra GB of RAM will solve your problem.
If you have a rogue operation that is constantly allocating new Objects, then adding additional memory will just delay the OOM Exception. Extra RAM is not a long term solution to poor memory management.
You need to work to identify why you are running out of memory first. If the issue is that you really do need more RAM (which is fairly unlikely), then go ahead and add more. If the problem is that you are unnecessarily allocating memory or leaking objects, then fix those problems first.
With Bitmaps specifically, you often don't need the full quality image. If your image is stored at 1080p resolution but the device is only a 480p screen, then loading the entire image into memory is a waste of space since most of the image won't be used anyway.

Difference in garbage collector behavior on Android device versus the emulator

I'm testing my application's memory usage on the emulator. And the problem is that on the emulator the app heap is just growing and growing, just a little bit of resources are freed. And if no collections are made it will cause an OutOfMemory exception on big resolution screens.
I downloaded the Sony SDK and there is an emulator configuration for the Xperia Z that has 1080x1920 resolution and the default heap is 64MB. I think it's a small heap size for that resolution because my app uses 40MB only starting up. However on my phone it's using 15MB of 64MB (res. 540x960).
So this quite small heap size (might not be real?) + GC behavior is causing OutOfMemory quite fast.
On a real device (I've tested only on mine), GC is working very nicely, it's freeing resources that are no longer used, but I really cannot predict if that will work on other phones.
Should I ignore how GC is working on my emulator or might it be my app's problem?
Growing heap on emulator indicates that at some point you have memory leak.
They are very common when you send intents between different applications ( e.g select image from gallery) . Most of device can handle such leaks with no problem.
Another reason for heap to grow up: inefficient memory operations. That means at some time you are asking to much memmory ( e.g you selected 5M image from gallery, created inpuststream for it and keep in memory as bitmap, so you asking 15+M emulator will show just hight heap grow, but most of devices will show error).
If you see heap grows - analyse your memory usage and detect leaks. Link
If you dont detect anything strange you can almost safely ignore heap warning.
Note: heap show supplied space, not used.

Measure (Android) heap fragmentation?

We have an app with lots of bitmaps in memory. It keeps failing with
java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: bitmap size exceeds VM budget
errors. It's possible that we are genuinely using too much memory; it's possible that we are leaking memory; it's also possible that we aren't doing anything wrong, and heap fragmentation is what's killing us. (Since Android's garbage collector doesn't relocate live blocks, we could have megabytes free and be unable to allocate 50K.)
Is there any way to rule out fragmentation? I've looked for something like maxAvail/memAvail, but haven't spotted anything apposite.
I would look into examining the heap via MAT. The Eclipse Memory Analyzer will help you determine which of your proposed issues you actually have.
There was a talk at Google I/O 2011 that covered some basics on the topic of memory management and debugging. You can watch it online here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CruQY55HOk&feature=relmfu

Android grow heap frag case

I'm working on an app to streaming music from internet... My app does many things and it's structured in this way: I have a tab view and every view is allocated in memory so every time I navigate through tabs I find again the previous status ( every tab can also open a webview to find information about songs, news etc in internet ).. all that grows memory occupation but makes the app very user friendly... After having paid attention to avoid memory leaks following the Android guide, I tried to look at the heap occupation and I found that my app allocates max 3.5MB of memory and the heap size allocated is 4.5 - 4.6 MB... I'm working on the emulator .. They are not so much I think, but sometimes my app is restarted founding in LogCat a strange message like
Grow heap ( frag case ) to 3.373 for 19764-byte allocation
What is it? an emulator issue? or something else? Am I using too much memory?
Thank you in advance for any help :)
The maximum heap size depends on the device (you can get that value by calling Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory()), but it's probably around 32MB. In order to save memory, Android doesn't allocate maximum memory to every app automatically. Instead it waits until the app need more memory and then gives it more heap space as needed until it's reached the max. I believe that's the Grow heap message you see.
If you do a lot of memory allocation and freeing, you may run into fragmentation problems. Wikipedia has a decent description here, but basically means that you might have the required memory available, just not all in one chunk. Hence the need to grow the heap.
So to answer your questions, it's probably not an emulator issue, it's just the nature of your program, which sounds a little memory heavy. However this isn't a bad thing. I don't think using 3-5MB for multiple tabs with webviews is too much.

what shoud be difference between "NativeHeapAllocatedSize" and "Runtime totalMemory" in Android to prevent from "OutOfmemory Exception"?

hello i m doing some runtime calculation for getting NativeHeap memory and allocated memory at runtime, so any one can suggest me
what should be the difference between "Debug.getNativeHeapAllocatedSize()" and "Runtime.getRuntime().totalMemory()"
so can prevent app by OutOf Memory Exception.
Thanks
Runtime.getRuntime().totalMemory()
Returns the total amount of memory which is available to the running program.
getNativeHeapAllocatedSize()
For devices below HoneyComb most of the huge allocations are deferred to the native heap (e.g Bitmaps). Hence this api is useful to find out how much of native heap is allocated.
OOM Errors occurs when there are no objects which can be freed by the DVM. Typically you have about 16MB in the Heap to play with (for a standard phone). Check your logs* to see GC statements having info about how much of memory is allocated.
I don't think there should be a fixed ratio to cause an OOM error. Like in the case when you load a very huge bitmap, here the native memory used is huge.
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