Chapter 4. Memory

When trying to reach the performance target for our application, memory is the matter to focus on: poorly managed memory in an application can affect the behavior of the whole system. It can also affect the other applications installed on our device in the same way as other applications could affect ours. As we all know, Android has a wide range of devices on the market with a lot of different configurations and memory amounts. It's up to the developers to work out which strategy to take while dealing with this amount of fragmentation, which pattern to follow while developing, and which tools to use to profile the code. This is the aim of this chapter. We will focus on heap memory, while we deal with cache in Chapter 10, Performance Tips.

We will have a look at how our device handles memory, deepening our knowledge of what garbage collection is and how it works in order to understand how to avoid common developing mistakes, and clarify what we will discuss to define best...