Advice regarding optimizing app performance since this app consists of lots of views.

Hey guys, I'm an amateur at android development and this is my first app. I'm trying to make an app which you could basically think of like a book. It will consist of verses from a certain scripture one verse per screen, the screen will have the verse in it's original language "sanskrit", and these three things: 1.it's meaning in english, 2. and hindi, and 3. the word meaning of each of the sanskrit words in hindi and english. I want these three things inside a tabhost.

Now the scripture has like 500 verses divided into 18 chapters. Each verse is like 10 words long. So there will be like 500 different views (if that's the right word for it... what I mean is 500 "screens" if that makes any sense) What I've done till now is, I made a sliding drawer that would take you to one of the 18 chapters. Now choosing one of the chapters will take you to a fragment, in which there will be a viewflipper, and it will consist of the verses in that chapter and a title page for that chapter which will consist of links to each of the verses. (I've done everything upto here there's just one sample chapter and 2 sample verses and it works fine) Also in the actionbar there will be a dropdown menu kind of thing clicking on which will give a list of verse numbers, and you can navigate to any verse from there. (I haven't done that yet)

So the thing is, 500 verses, 500 "views" (if i'm using that correctly) I don't know if that will make the device slow or what. I wanted to know am I using the right tools for it? Like the sliding drawer, fragment, tabhost, viewflipper? And the way I've structured the app, what do you feel about that? Will doing it differently could make it faster? I haven't had any problem yet with 1 chapter and 2 verses, I'm going to try adding a bunch of sample chapter and verses and see how it affects the performance. Still I just wanted to know ahead of time if I'm making any huge mistake in using one of the tools that I'm using.

I'd really really really appreciate if someone would take his/her time and give some valuable advice. Thanks in advance.

EDIT: So initially I was planning to have minSdkVersion = "11" and targetSdkVersion = "21", but if that would be impossible due to the large number of verses, I might reconsider that. And I'm using Eclipse to code, and AVD (Android Virtual device) manager to test the app.

EDIT: Also, using maybe sqlite to get the verses (I've just heard a bit about it never used it), would that help?

— modified on Nov 13, 2014, 6:17:26 PM

So initially I was planning to have minSdkVersion = "11" and targetSdkVersion = "21", but if that would be impossible due to the large number of verses, I might reconsider that. And I'm using Eclipse to code, and AVD (Android Virtual device) manager to test the app. Thanks for your time!

Kevin Berendsen

Kumar Animesh

So initially I was planning to have minSdkVersion = "11" and targetSdkVersion = "21", but if that would be impossible due to the large number of verses, I might reconsider that. And I'm using Eclipse to code, and AVD (Android Virtual device) manager to test the app. Thanks for your time!

Could create an AVD with API 11 and API 19? To speed AVDs up, check the use of GPU and as CPU an intel (in the dialog when creating an AVD). If you run the app on both AVDs, could you send me each of the logcats into different pastebins? (it's a tool, easy to paste large outcomes of logcats). That'd be really helpful.

So with only 1 chapter and 2 verses, it runs fine on the emulator, and here's the logcat output:

11-13 14:02:12.734: I/Choreographer(1649): Skipped 93 frames! The application may be doing too much work on its main thread.
11-13 14:02:53.463: W/EGL_emulation(1649): eglSurfaceAttrib not implemented
11-13 14:02:55.944: W/EGL_emulation(1649): eglSurfaceAttrib not implemented
11-13 14:02:56.493: D/dalvikvm(1649): GC_CONCURRENT freed 494K, 6% free 10830K/11444K, paused 11ms+43ms, total 244ms
11-13 14:02:56.613: I/Choreographer(1649): Skipped 65 frames! The application may be doing too much work on its main thread.

I'll add more verses and see how it goes.

65, 93 frames don't sound good. Do you think using sqlite could make any difference?

— modified on Nov 13, 2014, 3:12:00 PM

Kevin Berendsen

Below 100 frames is okay. Sqlite would make a large difference yeah. Sqlite would be faster.

Thanks man, really appreciate the help.