I'm making an android app where you can add items to a RecyclerList and the items contain an image and some text but the app takes a long time to start up and resume due to those Bitmaps.
The way my app works is this: When you add a new items to the RecyclerView it prompts you for an image and then I decode that into a Bitmap (I reduce the image size) and save it in that Item's data model. Then on onBindViewHolder() I get the image from the Item and add it to the Layout. Also on onCreate() I iterate through all the saved Bitmaps (Saved in a folder) and initialize my list from there but this takes a relatively long time.
How can I make the Bitmaps load faster so that the app won't have long delays on onCreate() and onResume() (This one is because of the RecyclerView)?
What I thought about was maybe not saving the Bitmaps in the item at all since I'm saving a UUID and the UUID is the Bitmap's file name so this way I only load the images in onBindViewHolder() and then I can immediately recycle() them but I don't know if this will work.
I also read something about LruCache but I didn't really understand it, can it help in my case?
If there's any more information I should post about my app so answering this will be easier please tell me.
EDIT: The images are prompted and are from the user's gallery.
Related
i have an appwidget which starts an activity as user clicks it.
In my Activity i have a gridview containing relatively small Drawables(Images, because drawable could be mor than just Images) but user can size them.
I noticed that it takes too Long to size them at runtime when Scrolling trough the gridview.
I want to prepare an lruCache only one time in my appWidget's onUpdate which is called at the very beginning when the user places the appwidget on the Screen.
The problem
When i define an lruCache in my appWidget with
private final int lruCacheSize = (int) (Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory()/1024);
private LruCache<String, BitmapDrawable> myLruCache;
...
myLruCache = new LruCache<String, BitmapDrawable>(lruCacheSize) {
#Override
protected int sizeOf(String key, BitmapDrawable value) {
// TODO Auto-generated method stub
return super.sizeOf(key, value);
}
};
Will it only exist as Long as the process exist of the appWidget? Or does the Cache-File from lruCache stays in my cacheDir of my app? Or will it be deleted after the process of the appWidget is finished? If it does exist over the process-lifetime of my appWidget, how can i Access it from my Activity?
I don't want to create everytime the user clicks on the appWidget a LruCache and fill it up with all the relatively small Images the gridview will Need later. I want to do it once, or if user clears the Cache which will be checked every hour(to save battery).
The Question
How can i achieve that? Or is there a much better/ simpler way.
Time is not really (if it happens once at the very beginning) the Problem, i notify the user that the Cache is being prepared when placing the appWidget on the Screen.
Any help is appreciated.
Update regarding CommonsWare answere
Use Traceview to determine specifically why your implementation is slow.
The app Scrolling is slow because i provide three sizes (small, medium, large) and i scale them at while Scrolling trough my gridview.(Because it would take several seconds to scale them once at activity Startup, so i don't want that).
See here what i do in my imageview which will later Show the drawable(which is an appIcon):
android:scaleType="fitXY"
android:adjustViewBounds="true"
This causes the lag because i do this for everyimage depending if selected scale size is small medium or large.
There is no "Cache-File" in your code.
So then i i'm misunderstanding something. Doesn't the lruCache create an Cache-File in the Cache-Directory of my application? If not how does in works?
First, you cannot force the user to install the app widget. Work on solving the actual performance problem, rather than trying to build some optimization that will not help all users.
My "app" is only an appwidget. There is not appIcon like at FaceBook. It is only an appWidget when he doenloads my app. Which starts an activity when you click on the button.
Second, your process can readily be terminated milliseconds after onUpdate() completes. Do not fill a cache, only to have it never be used.
I want to use the Cache which i want to fill with the Drawables in the onUpdate of the appWidget, and then i want to use These Drawables from the Cache in my activity. So i don't understand why i never would use the Cache? Maybe i'm misunderstanding something.
Picasso would give you better performance from the user's standpoint.
Does it fit my Needs after the update right now?
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Update 2
Since the scaling should be done by the GPU and take microseconds, I have difficulty believing that is your problem. What specifically did Traceview show you that made you think that scaling has something to do with this?
I noticed that the Scrolling is very fluid at medium size because that's nearly the origin size of the appIcon from the PackageManager. If scroll trough large, where only 2 or 3 appIcons are displayed per row (at medium there are 5 or 6 displayed but it is much more fluid)m it lags. (With the same logic behind it). So the only Logical answere can be scaling in the XML at the ImageView. As i commented that XML-Scaling out and scaled the appIcons to the size Large and put them directly scalled to to my Adapter for GridView it runs really smooth( Only one or to really small lags at the beginning because convertView is null??)
onUpdate() will be called much more frequently than the user will actually use your app widget.
That's right after every onclick or at the specified time. But i check if the Cache has been cleared or not, if not don't Change anything, if so load Drawables to Cache.
I noticed that it takes too Long to size them at runtime when Scrolling trough the gridview.
Use Traceview to determine specifically why your implementation is slow.
Will it only exist as Long as the process exist of the appWidget?
It will only exist for the lifetime of the process of your app.
Or does the Cache-File from lruCache stays in my cacheDir of my app?
There is no "Cache-File" in your code.
I don't want to create everytime the user clicks on the appWidget a LruCache and fill it up with all the relatively small Images the gridview will Need later. I want to do it once, or if user clears the Cache which will be checked every hour(to save battery).
First, you cannot force the user to install the app widget. Work on solving the actual performance problem, rather than trying to build some optimization that will not help all users.
Second, your process can readily be terminated milliseconds after onUpdate() completes. Do not fill a cache, only to have it never be used.
Or is there a much better/ simpler way.
Use Traceview to determine exactly where your problem lies. Then, solve that problem. For example, the problem could be that you are loading these images on the main application thread, and using a library like Picasso would give you better performance from the user's standpoint.
The app Scrolling is slow because i provide three sizes (small, medium, large) and i scale them at while Scrolling trough my gridview
Since the scaling should be done by the GPU and take microseconds, I have difficulty believing that is your problem. What specifically did Traceview show you that made you think that scaling has something to do with this?
Doesn't the lruCache create an Cache-File in the Cache-Directory of my application?
No.
If not how does in works?
It is an in-memory cache.
So i don't understand why i never would use the Cache?
onUpdate() will be called much more frequently than the user will actually use your app widget.
I am bulding up a grid of images for an app I'm building. It works like so:
Build up a list of Image IDs, which I must query using a different content provider each (these are images from MMS threads)
Create new activity, which hosts an ImageGridFragment. This fragment has a custom adapter that takes the grid of images, and loads each one as a bitmap asynchronously.
After images are loaded, they are cached in an LRU cache so I don't need to run unnecessary computation
So far, everything works quite well. However, I would like to pre-buffer images so that when the user scrolls down, s/he doesn't have to wait for images to load. They should already be loaded. The stock Android Gallery accomplishes. I've had a look at the source, but think there must be a more straightforward way.
To answer members' questions
Images are loaded one by one using the content://mms/part/xxx, where xxx is the ID of an image. These are MMS images, and to my knowledge, cannot be loaded as a batch process (though, maybe I'm wrong). I use a content provider in an AsyncTask to load each image
I've tried the following:
Pre buffer 30 images or so right when the fragment is created. This is not ideal because the massive I/O request, actually prevents the on-screen images from loading quickly (but the buffering does work well!)
Detect when the requested view to load is at the very bottom-right hand corner of the screen, which could work, but then would fail in the case that the GridView takes up only part of the screen. It also seems like there should be a cleaner way to do this
Thought about, but did not try, an OnScrollListener, but this will not pre-buffer images until I start scrolling, which is not ideal
So, my questions are:
Is there a good way to detect when the last GridView item is requested to load? I found that the GridView.getlastvisibleposition() method is not useful here, because it is actually returning the last element for which Adapter.getView() has been called for. If I can do this accurately, I can launch the buffer request at that time
Is there a better way to do this?
you can do right this
if(GridView.getlastvisibleposition() = mAdapter.count()-1)
how you load the images?
is it from URL or from sdcard?
are you using a image loader library?
Note
This question is not aiming code answers. It intend to get some ideas
for best code practices that deals with the problem proposed.
Problem
List view that is connected as usual with array adapter of countries.
country object have 2 attributes. an image url and country name. at
the very first time images will be downloaded from the url and must be
saved on the internal memory. next time images will be loaded from the
internal memory if exist. otherwise, they will be downloaded.
What is the best structure to solve this problem?
Spot lights
a bitmap object is the container that a download steam will write to.
an image in the internal will also be sit to the bitmap object before we set bitmap to the image view.
(is this point optional) a bitmap ref. should be a member of the country class.
on download complete the downloaded image may and may not still needed because it's view is no longer visible (actually it is visible
but another country owns it). is it better to check that before we set
the image bitmap. or its better to just notify data changed.
What do you think?
Use this library for image downloading
https://github.com/nostra13/Android-Universal-Image-Loader
It has tons of features, you can cache in memory or on disk, has image loading events, and a ton of more stuff.
Context:
I have a main activity holding 6 tabs, each tabs holds a gridview with 30+ images, and around 8 images a shown at any moment (each gridview is scollable).
With these many images I implemented a simple caching system, that is to only cache the latest 25 of them, if new image is needed to display and is not in the cache, I will decode that image from /data/date directory and overwrite the oldest entry in the cache. And before overwriting the oldest entry, I will call Bitmap.recycle() on that.
Problem:
At some point, after displying more than 25 images, old images will start to be recycled. if I were to now navigate back to one of the tab where their Image is no longer in the cache, the GetView method will take care to load the picture again. The Issue is other than the first Item in the Gridview will be calling GetView, rest of the image will never get call, and the Gridview will attempt to display a cached image where it has been recycled already.
Any Suggestion? either to force get view or a smart way to cache image in this scenario?
Much Appreciated
Thanks
I kind of solved this by creating my own ImageView extending the Android ImageView. Then Overrided the onDraw(Canvas canvas) method and added logic to reload cache if cache is gone.
looks Hacky... but worked as wanted. really wish i cna do better than that if there is someone who can teach me. Thanks a ton!!
In my Android App I have a listview containing 30 rows, and each row consists of several textviews of which one is spannable and sometimes contains a lot of formatted text and images.
Those images are loaded from the web asynchroneously: A placeholder is displayed until the image has been downloaded is then replaced by the image.
Unfortunately, the rows of the listview are loaded when I scroll over them. This makes the whole thing very slow. Also, those images are loaded from the web again and again, whenever I scroll over the row.
How can I turn it off, that the ListView rows are loaded when I scroll over them? They should be loaded once when I start the activity and never again.
Best regards and thanks in advance,
Jan Oliver
When you do a lazy-loading ListView, is because you want to speed it up your app. Turn it off is not the best solution. So, what you can do is implementing a basic cache system in order to avoid downloading and setting the ImageView again and again.
The easiest way to do so is implementing a HashMap with URLs as keys and Bitmaps as values. Something like this:
Map cache = new HashMap();
// then, on your lazy loader
Bitmap image = cache.get(urlOfTheImage);
if( image == null ){
// download and decode the image as normal,
// then assign the decoded bitmap to
// the 'image' variable
cache.put(image);
}
imageView.setImageBitmap(image);
If those images will be the same always, meaning that each time you open the app the same images will be downloaded, then you better save those images in the filesystem and use them from there.
On the other hand, if the images tend to change, you could implement some interesting stuff: use SoftReferences. There's an explanation in this video. This can also be used if you are loading images from the filesystem.
Edit
With regards to your comment, I highly recommend you watching the video I posted. It's one hour long, but it really worths the effort. When using an adapter, checking if the convertView is null is just a simple way to improve performance, though there are some other techniques that will improve your app even more. Also, if you had have problems while using that trick, is because you are probably implementing it the wrong way. Remember: even if you don't re-inflate the views, you do have to set the value of each one of the children views, otherwise you will experience some problems.
If you can, start with an Image Array full of the "placeholder images", then download the images in to an Array firing an AsyncTask during on Create. During row view building just refer to the array. That way if it has the new image it will load it, if not it will get the placeholder.
If you have a lot of data its gonna get real slow and be a crappy expirience for the user.
Create a list of objects that represent each row. Create a loader as a background thread that updates the objects as it loads the data. Your list view will draw data from the objects.
(Not a good idea if you have hundreds of rows and a huge amount of data in each row - in that case, you should only load data within a few rows of the currently active row and have some sort of MRU cache).