memory of drawables, is it better to have resources inside APK, outside APK or is it the same for memory?

Question

Hi

I have an application that draws a lot of graphics and change them. Since I have many graphics, I thought of having the images outside the APK, downloaded from the internet as needed, and saved on the files application folder.

But I started to get outOfMemory exceptions.

The question is: Does android handle memory different if I load a graphic from APK than if I load it from 'disk'?

code using APK:

topView.setBackgroundResource(R.drawable.bg);

code if image is outside APK:

Drawable d = Drawable.createFromPath(pathName); topView.setBackgroundDrawable(d);

Thanks

Daniel

Answer 1

No, internally they are handled the same. Most likely, you're leaking the images, or not cleaning them up as quickly as you could. Try calling Bitmap.recycle(); once you're done with an image, to force Android to clean it up.

Answer 2

At runtime, the memory footprint you're seeing should be about the same no matter which way you load it. Android will use a utility to byte-align resources internal to the apk which should improve loading times.