Android App - Can we Reuse Images in the Run time?

We have an Android application that throws out of memory error on Android 1.6. It is working fine on 2.0 onwards. We are trying to cut down on the runtime memory usage at this point.

We were thinking of reusing images – such as the background image of each screen. Is it possible to load t开发者_JAVA百科he background image once in the memory at the time of app launch and reuse this cached copy in each screen rather than each screen loading the same background image increasing the overall footprint in the RAM?

We understand that there many other ways and best practices around runtime memory usage. But at this point, we just wanted to know whether this “image reuse” approach is really feasible?

If yes, how can we do this? Will it at all save any memory or the Android OS will still create multiple copies of the same asset for each screen not giving any benefit from the memory perspective?

Thank you very much for your time in reading my post.

If that background image is loaded as a Drawable from a Resource, it's bitmap data is already shared between all Drawables created that way. So no, it probably wouldn't benefit you in your particular case.

Yes you can reuse images.

It is usually done for ListViews where each row contains the same image.

In this case, you can get the Bitmap once in the constructor of your adapter, and reuse it in the getView() method, so you don't have to load it for each row. This trick is presented here

In your case, you could load your background bitmap in the onCreate() method of your main activity, save it as a public static attribute and then re-use it in all your activities.

But I think it won't make that much of a difference and surcharge the code for nothing.

As you are working on tweaking your UI, I suggest you watch the 2009 Google I/O Presentation by Romain Guy, if you did not see it yet. It shows a lot of useful tricks for boosting an UI's performances, especially when it comes to Bitmap manipulation.