Question

I currently have a remote service that communicates constantly with an activity on the same app.

I need to send messages in and out extensively at some times. Which method of messaging is better, faster, and battery friendly? Using messages or aidl interface?

As of now I’m using aidl interface but for some reason I think there is a lot of overhead specially when attaching listeners…

Any feedback greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I currently have a remote service that communicates constantly with an activity on the same app.

A remote services is generally not a good idea.

Well, my app is a multimedia audio application that needs to run in the background which requires a lot of resources: memory. Having this in the same process as my activities would most likely bring issues to reaching the limit of resource usage per process.

Then use less memory. A audio player should not need to exceed the per-process RAM limits, even with activities.

Also, the benefits are, if your UI crashes for some reason your service doesn’t.

This is not a particularly good reason for wasting device RAM and CPU time. That’s a fine approach for a server, less so for an embedded system.

Which method of messaging is better, faster, and battery friendly? Using messages or aidl interface?

They should be fairly comparable. IPC considerations should swamp most other effects. For example, quoting myself from one of my books:

For example, in the CPU-Java/AIDLOverhead directory of the book’s source
code, you will find a pair of projects implementing the same do-nothing
method in equivalent services. One uses AIDL and is bound to remotely
from a separate client application; the other is a local service in the client
application itself. The client then calls the do-nothing method 1 million
times for each of the two services. On average, on a Samsung Galaxy Tab
10.1, 1 million calls takes around 170 seconds for the remote service, while it
takes around 170 milliseconds for the local service. Hence, the overhead of
an individual remote method invocation is small (~170 microseconds), but
doing lots of them in a loop, or as the user flings a ListView, might become
noticeable.

That being said, if you are concerned about the overhead (yet insist on the remote service), you are probably better served trying both and using logging to determine if there is a clear winner.