How to Increase Heap Size of an Android Application

How to increase heap size of an android application?

You can use android:largeHeap="true" to request a larger heap size, but this will not work on any pre Honeycomb devices. On pre 2.3 devices, you can use the VMRuntime class, but this will not work on Gingerbread and above.

The only way to have as large a limit as possible is to do memory intensive tasks via the NDK, as the NDK does not impose memory limits like the SDK.

Alternatively, you could only load the part of the model that is currently in view, and load the rest as you need it, while removing the unused parts from memory. However, this may not be possible, depending on your app.

How to increase heap size in Android?

I'm looking for something that isn't a polite request to the OS and does effectively the same thing as the depreciated VMRuntime.getRuntime().setMinimumHeapSize(BIGGER_SIZE)

There is no means to do this in the Android SDK. Otherwise, every developer would think that they are a special snowflake and deserve 16GB of system RAM on a 512MB device.

I've tried setting android:largeHeap="true" but it has had no visible effect

You can use getMemoryClass() and getLargeMemoryClass() (on ActivityManager) to see what the difference is in your heap limit when using android:largeHeap="true". Also, bear in mind that android:largeHeap="true" is only available on API Level 11+ devices.

I've since optimized my code such that I have no variable initializations in any loops and things are declared static and final where possible.

You are certainly welcome to use the DDMS Allocation Tracker, heap dumps, and the like to determine the source of your memory usage that is triggering the GC.

Android Studio - How to increase Allocated Heap Size

I looked at my Environment Variables and had a System Variable called _JAVA_OPTIONS with the value -Xms256m -Xmx512m, after changing this to -Xms256m -Xmx1024m the max heap size increased accordingly.

Android: how to increase heap size at runtime?

Instead of increasing heap size you can do some thing better. As you said that you are maintaining cache in you application which is implemented using SoftReferences. The best thing is to use LruCache you can do some thing like this:

private LruCache<String, Bitmap> bitmapCache;
final int memClass;
int cacheSize;

memClass = ((ActivityManager) context.getSystemService(
    Context.ACTIVITY_SERVICE)).getMemoryClass();

Return the approximate per-application memory class of the current device. This gives you an idea of how hard a memory limit you should impose on your application to let the overall system work best. The returned value is in megabytes; the baseline Android memory class is 16 (which happens to be the Java heap limit of those devices); some device with more memory may return 24 or even higher numbers.

cacheSize = 1024 * 1024 * memClass / 10;
bitmapCache = new LruCache<String, Bitmap>(cacheSize) {
  @Override
  protected int sizeOf(String key, Bitmap value) {
    return value.getHeight() * value.getRowBytes();
 }
};

it will remove the bitmap images from LruCache if the memory exceeds the located memory to LruCache and load the new image in it.

How to increase heap size in c# xamarin application?

The attribute android:largeHeap="true" belongs to the application tag, please check the official document here: application. You put this attribute in manifest tag, this should be the reason why android:largeHeap="true" doesn't work for your app.

By the way, maybe it's off topic, since your problem is caused by large bitmap, using native memory (NDK & JNI) can actually bypass the heap size limitation. You can check this case: JNI bitmap operations , for helping to avoid OOM when using large images.

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