For my app, I have about 15Mb (which can be compressed with some processing power to about 5Mb) of audio+video+image data that I need to save to disk. For instance, I need to save this when user is interrupted with a phone call (because the activity might get killed after this) and when the user leaves the app.
I can save the data to SD card in about 10 seconds if I don’t compress it and something like 20 seconds if I do compress it, where I’d like it compressed. What options to I have for saving my data when onPause is called such that I can be sure the data has been saved?
From some basic experiments, my activity gets killed if onPause hasn’t finished after 5 seconds. Some ideas I’ve had:
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Starting a new Thread in onPause and saving the data there. This seems to work fine but seems like something I shouldn’t be doing.
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Starting a service, copying the data to the service somehow (would this be slow?) and then getting the service to save the data. I think this puts a notification icon at the top of the phone, but I don’t think it’s awful for a user to see the “Saving data…” task here.
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Can I put the data in a SQL database quickly and then save it later when the user returns to the app?
(Due to the nature of the app, there really isn’t any practical way I can save the data as I go because the user can transform the data in destructive ways with time consuming operations (e.g. 10 seconds for some operations). Even if I stored the original data and a list of the actions performed to recreate the data, the user would have to wait a minute or two when the app is next started up to process this.)
Technically, what you want is impossible. There are no guarantees after
onPause().The best answer is what @Viktor Lannér suggested. To phrase it another way, don’t wait until
onPause()to need to do 10-20 seconds of I/O. Devise some mechanism to allow you to save incrementally as the user performs operations, as a fallback mechanism if nothing else. This is akin to how a database maintains a transaction log.This is dangerous, because if the activity is closing (e.g.,
onDestroy()will be called momentarily), Android might terminate your process before your thread is completed.Make this be an
IntentService, so it automatically shuts down when the work is complete. I wouldn’t “copy the data to the service”, but rather make the data centrally available, by a static data member if needed. This will not automatically put “a notification icon at the top of the phone”, and for something of this duration, that is probably not needed.Flash I/O is not faster for a SQL database than for anything else.
Then this probably isn’t designed for a mobile platform. Consider whether this app is an appropriate use of the technology.