Android High Performance Programming

Memory management

Memory is always, by definition, a scarce resource on any software platform. But when it comes to mobile devices, this is an even more constrained resource. Mobile devices often have less physical memory and processor capacity that their bigger peers, and having an efficient memory management is crucial to improving user experience and software stability.

Dalvik Virtual Machine routinely triggers garbage collection in a similar way to Java, but this does not mean that we can ignore memory management completely. One very common error in junior programmers is to create memory leaks. A memory leak happens when an object is stored in memory, but it cannot be accessed anymore by the running code. The size can vary a lot (from an ...