Android Developers › AppWidgets: Reusing RemoteViews instance leaks memory?

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AppWidgets: Reusing RemoteViews instance leaks memory?  2 posts by 2 authors in  Android Developers

Michael Elsdörfer

Join group to reply 5/22/09

I'm writing a widget. Currently, I'm have a simple ImageView, and 
calling RemoteViews. setImageViewBitmap(). I'm using a service to do 
the updates. 

I thought it might be a good idea to reuse an existing RemoteViews 
instance, so I'm only querying it the first time around, and 
subsequently simply call setImageViewBitmap() with the new image. 

This works well initially, but after some time I first start getting 
"!!! FAILED BINDER TRANSACTION !!!" errors, and later, an OutOfMemory 
exception. 

Simply creating a new RemoveViews instance every time works flawlessy 
on the other hand. I'm just curios why that would be, any ideas?

Jeff Sharkey

Join group to reply 5/27/09

Re: [android-developers] AppWidgets: Reusing RemoteViews instance leaks memory?

So internally RemoteViews is simply a set of actions that are 
"serialized" and sent to another process.  Each time you make a call 
to something like setDouble(), you're adding an additional action to 
RemoteViews' internal list. 

Because there isn't a way of clearing these actions from a RemoteViews 
object, all of your successive setImageViewBitmap() calls, along with 
their Bitmaps, remain in the internal list, and are actually 
"serialized" and applied each time your send it.  :( 

In this case it's best to just create a new RemoteViews object every time. 

j 

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-- 
Jeff Sharkey 
jsharkey@android.com