Question

I have an ArrayList of custom, simple Serializable objects I would like to cache to disk and read on re-launch. My data is very small, about 25 objects and at most 5 lists so I think SQLite would be overkill. In the iPhone world I would use NSKeyedArchiver and NSKeyedUnarchiver which works great. On Android I’ve attempted to do this with with a FileOutputStream and ObjectOutputStream and while the result is the same, the performance is terrible. Is there a better (read faster) way to cache small objects to the file system in Android?

Answer 1

For what it worth I cache some of my String data to disk using BufferedWriter/BufferedReader and it’s very fast. Matter of fact it is faster than storing the same data to SharedPreferences. The code goes something like this (note that things happen faster when you provide buffer size)

final BufferedWriter out = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(file), 1024);
out.write(stuff);
out.close();