Question

What is the less memory consuming and fastest (in respect of code lines and time of execution) way to do some task in the background thread?

I need to send many simple tasks to the background thread and I won’t obviously use AsyncTask class for this. So is handler what I am looking for or there’s a faster way?

    final Handler handler = new Handler();
    final Runnable runnable = new Runnable() {
        @Override
        public void run() {
            try {
                Thread.sleep(1000);
            } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
            handler.post(new Runnable() {
                @Override
                public void run() {
                    infoMsg.setVisibility(View.INVISIBLE);
                }
            });
        }
    };
    new Thread(runnable).start();

Answer 1

handler is usually used for the UI thread in order to postpone something to be done in the future.
in your example , this solution would be perfect.

asynctask is used when you don’t care for when and what should be the order of the tasks to do . asynctasks should not be used for too long operations (like a connection that keeps being alive till the end user stops it) . you cannot assume that at more than one asynctask are active (but one is ok to assume) .

for any other usage , i simply use a thread , but mostly the handler and the asynctask are enough.