Question

I’m developing an app for WP7 (VS2010 Express for Windows Phone RTM and WP Emulator), but now im facing a big problem related to memory usage.
The app itself has like 12 views, and some of them are reused with different data. It’s a newsreader, so the views are mostly listboxes (image thumbnail, stackpanels and textblocks).

The first view has a listbox with 30 items. This takes about 20MB of RAM, but as i navigate between views the current and peak RAM usage start to rise. Well the peak usage it’s around 55MB which i think is OK, but the app has a gallery section in which after selecting a thumbnail it navigates to another view which displays a downloaded image (JPEG, 1131px × 1647px, ~486KB) but initially fit to the screen. Until here all good, but for scaling purposes i’m using Laurent Bugnion’s Multitouch Behavior and the problem is that when i zoom in the image, the memory usage gets near 90MB (like 87MB last time i tested with the maximum scale size at 2.5).

Also after i navigate the views the current ram usage may permantly reach and stay at 35MB, which i beleive is due to the device caching some things.

So, as the title says, how can i avoid such huge ram usage?

Edit—-
Also i’d like to ask if the fact that in my app one can navigate from any view to almost every other and that in between there’s always a page transition animation (like the one for the phone list application template in the beta tools), may be contributing to the excessive memory usage.

Answer 1

Well maybe i should look into deepzoom (but when i first read about it, i thought it was for using it with the same image at different sizes, like google maps in satellite view), but yesterday i solved it by using a webbrowser inside my view, so if before i had:

<Image x:Name="imgPlaceHolder" delay:LowProfileImageLoader.UriSource="{Binding Path=ActualImageSource}" MaxHeight="800"
               MaxWidth="480" >
            <interac:Interaction.Behaviors >
                <tbeh:MultiTouchBehavior x:Name="ImageMTB" IsScaleEnabled="True"
                                                 MinimumScale="0.4"
                                                 MaximumScale="2.5"
                                                 IsRotateEnabled="False"
                                                 IsDebugModeActive="False"
                                                 IsTranslateXEnabled="True"
                                                 IsTranslateYEnabled="True"

                                     >

                </tbeh:MultiTouchBehavior>
            </interac:Interaction.Behaviors>
        </Image>

I changed that to:

<phone:WebBrowser Source="{Binding Path=ActualImageSource}" x:Name="wbbigimage"  />

It uses less memory and takes care of the zoom with no problems.

I’ll wait a bit for someone with a better solution before checking this one.