Android Best Practices: MAT

W.Elsinga — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 23:14:11 +0000

When you want to improve an Android application performance, you need to do profiling. Welcome MAT!

What is MAT?

It’s a Java heap analyzer tool introduced by Eclipse that helps you find memory leaks.

How-To

First you need to extract a hprof file from the Android device. When running the device select the Dump HPROF file option as shown here

Convert the .hprof file from the Dalvik format to the J2SE HPROF format. You can do this using the hprof-conv tool provided in the Android SDK.

hprof-conv dump.hprof converted-dump.hprof

Import the converted hprof file into MAT, and start anaylzing

Android Best Practices: StrictMode

W.Elsinga — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 23:05:37 +0000

When developing Android applications that uses network and database access, you need to do performance tuning. This is where StrictMode comes in handy

StrictMode?

StrictMode is used to detect memory leaks. It’s has introduced in Gingerbread and can be used as a development tool.

The configuration below was the proposed in the reference documentation:

public void onCreate() {
if (DEVELOPER_MODE) {
StrictMode.setThreadPolicy(new StrictMode.ThreadPolicy.Builder()
.detectDiskReads()
.detectDiskWrites()
.detectNetwork() // or .detectAll() for all detectable problems
.penaltyLog()
.build());
StrictMode.setVmPolicy(new StrictMode.VmPolicy.Builder()
.detectLeakedSqlLiteObjects()
.detectLeakedClosableObjects()
.penaltyLog()
.penaltyDeath()
.build());
}
super.onCreate();
}

Update If you’re looking on how to get StrictMode working for all Android platform versions, have a look at this article.

best practices – Wiebe Elsinga

Android Best Practices: MAT

What is MAT?

How-To

Android Best Practices: StrictMode

StrictMode?