Question

I’m writing a program that involves a ton of images, over 100 per screen density. Fortunately, they aren’t very big in terms of space. I use roughly 11 at any given time. I also use the function Bitmap.createScaledBitmap on every image which seems to take up a lot of memory.

So far in debugging this app, I seem to be able to use it indefinitely without running into a memory problem, which I’m hoping means I’m not leaking memory.

However, the one thing I’ve noticed is that if I “exit” my app through the back button (I’m not running anything in the background), and then restart the app shortly after, I sometimes get a out of memory error at a call to Bitmap.createScaledBitmap

01-07 19:01:24.935: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(27419): java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: bitmap size exceeds VM budget

So basically my question is, what am I doing wrong here? Do I need to be cleaning up my own garbage, like in onDestroy when the user presses the back button? I would have thought the GC would automatically take care of this when the back button was pressed and the activity was destroyed. This leads me to believe I am doing something else wrong, like a memory leak. But then I come back to the fact my app can take heavy memory use for 20 minutes but then kill itself in 5 seconds after a restart, which is what is baffling me.

Thanks all.

Edit: I implemented a couple quick and dirty fixes.

First I tried this, and it was harder to get the application to force close.

@Override
public void onBackPressed() {
    finish();
}

Next I tried this combined with the onBackPressed and I could no longer duplicate my problem. Note that the method call is just a loop that basically does allImages = null;

protected void onStop () {
    super.onStop();
    mComponent.releaseImages();
}

At this point it appears that after calling finish(), there are still objects in memory from the activity. Rather strange.

Answer 1

This problem has been attributed to a bug with android. Refer to the following links for information about the problem and some workarounds.

OutofMemoryError: bitmap size exceeds VM budget (Android)

http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=8488

http://mobi-solutions.blogspot.com/2010/08/how-to-if-you-want-to-create-and.html