Android how many threads can I have going?

I have an Android app that has separate things going on but are all basically threads (and definitely are threads to the Android debugger)

There are multiple animation listeners that loop and call each other

There is a countdown timer that is always counting down to zero after it is initiated

Now I 开发者_运维知识库need to consider adding more countdown timers. How many of these kind of looping processes can I have going on? In this particular implementation I am not concerned about performance, efficiency, etc, until it becomes apparent.

Insight appreciated

I would be very surprised to learn that you exhausted the number of threads you can use safely in an android application, as long as you are properly managing their lifetime and prevent "busy loops"and the like from occuring.

One thing I did learn though, I am pretty sure you can only have 5 asynctasks operational at any time, and they will arbitrarily continue to exist and get killed or respawned by themselves if you start new ones...ie if i turned an asynctask on then off five times the debugger will say 5 async threads operational, but I can continually toggle on and off as much as I want because the resource pool will kill the oldest dead asynctask.

There is no maximum that I know of. I can tell you, however, that you most likely don't NEED that many threads.

You can keep countdown listeners in a single thread using Android's Handler, specifically the postDelayed() method. Start a Looper in a separate thread, and use a Handler to manage the timeouts -- don't busy wait, or sleep-loop.

I don't believe countdown timer will create threads--it should simply add your task to a queue on your main thread from the looks of it.

All your listeners should take place on the same thread as well (there is a single thread that manages all listeners (for visible objects anyway).

So you probably aren't using anywhere near as many threads as you think you are. If you were creating a lot of threads I'd be worried--they are really hard to keep synchronized and may cost you a lot more than you'd gain, but with the structures listed I'd go ahead and allocate as many as you feel appropriate (but test for performance on a cheap device of course)