Android App Out of Memory Issues - Tried Everything and Still at a Loss

Android app out of memory issues - tried everything and still at a loss

One of the things that really helped the memory issue in my case ended up being setting inPurgeable to true for my Bitmaps. See Why would I ever NOT use BitmapFactory's inPurgeable option? and the answer's discussion for more info.

Dianne Hackborn's answer and our subsequent discussion (also thanks, CommonsWare) helped clarify certain things I was confused about, so thank you for that.

Android Out of Memory Exception & Paused Activities

You might want to look at Bitmap managing in the developer's documentation.

In particular: a bitmap is kept in memory as long as a reference exists to it. So, if you absolutely have to use large bitmaps for your buttons (as you are describing) you might be do better by loading it manually and using recycle as soon as your Activity disappears from sight.

Linux out of memory process killing my android app

Direct allocations in native code don't count against that Java heap total. There may be other possibilities as well (perhaps pages mapped and populated from files?).

If you have a custom android build, you may be able to set OOM killer values to preserve your own application.

Android : Application's state when application is out of stack due to Memory constrain

Indeed a very good question which I try to puzzle out myself.

I even wonder What's the difference between killing an app and restarting the phone.

If a user manually kills an app or opens 20 other apps, he'd probably want the app to start from the beginning.
Why Android aren't restoring state after phone restart?

Also, I see that when an app is killed (by the system), global variables turn to null upon activity reinitiating.
This kind of breaks the concept of Java. If you have some kind of state in the application and the application erases it, I would expect the application to restart.

The solution I propose:

1. Handle the case of a state problem: Initiate a simple state (new Object()) as a global variable. For each Activity, in the methods onCreate/Start/Resume check that the state is null. If it's null launch the first activity with 'Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_CLEAR_TOP' - as if the application is relaunched.
 2. Try not to use global variables - Always put data in the intent.
 3. Lazy load global variables - If you do want to use global data, don't count on one time initialization. Lazy load them 'if (A.MY_DATA == null) {A.MY_DATA = new ...}' - Don't forget to do it in the background if it will take a long time (AsyncTask). Loading partial state needs to be done carefully because it may not comply to other loaded state objects.

The downside of the first point is that the state problem handling needs to be done on every Activity (AOP is not yet implemented in Android).

Hope that helped.

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