Question

I have an application that is very image-intense, and I’m finding that I’m running into alot of OutOfMemory issues when loading up multiple activities.

The activities are all gridviews or listviews of bitmaps, and clicking on an image takes you to another activity that contains another set of images (sort of like an album of albums of albums of albums). The first 3 activities run fine, but when navigating further down, I start running into some serious OutOfMemory Errors.

After doing a stack dump with DDMS, it appears that the GridViews and Listviews of the previous activities are hogging all the memory. This is kind of expected, since they are showing lots of bitmaps themselves, but I’m not sure how the VM goes about freeing activities in the stack, and if they do it even when you havn’t called “finish()” on them.

Do Activities recylce their views when they go into the background and then restore them when you navigate back to the activity, or is clearing the imageviews in my gridviews and listviews this something I need to handle manually on the activities onPause() and onResume() when navigating away from the activity in the lifecycle functions?

Answer 1

Please see my answer on OOME

Always call bitmap.recycle() after using bitmaps, since GC cannot clear memory held by Bitmaps.

The above link has a generic solution, please go through it.