Monday, February 2, 2009

How I improved my android application responsiveness in the emulator... without doing anything !

It's been a long time since I found the Android application I'm developping ( a word game ) was not as responsive as I would like.
As I don't have any kind of Android phone, all of my testing happen in the emulator, and I'm not sure how well it fits the phone reality ( and actually, I'm aware that this does not mean anything, as there may be a lot of different phones out there... ).
But still, I expected the emulator to be in scope with reality, and to give me a good start to measure responsiveness ( and actually, I have no other choices ).

So the responsiveness of my application was below my expectations, and I had planned a optimization phase to fix it as much as I could.

And yesterday, I found myself manipulating my game, and finding it was responsive enough for me !
It took me a little time to understand what had changed, as I never tried to optimize it, and my last developments were GUI / cosmetic changes !

Actually, I had disconnected the debugger !
When my application is running with eclipse connected to it, it is way slower than it is without it !

Although it is a simple optimization, and quite reassuring for my game, it is the second time that having eclipse connected to the emulator gets in my way ( the first time being with the profiler : here ).

And that is more perturbing...

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