Lots have been said here and I just want to say that as a fellow real time game developer I have the exact same problem. I will even go as far as to tell you the name of an app that this happens in, my most popular game "BreakTheBlocks Lite", which hit a million downloads last month :), has this problem. The majority of the bad feedback that I receive on this game, besides the usual highly intellectual 1 star comments of "this sucks" and "borrrriiiinnnnngggg!!!!", are related to how bad the lag is.
When I initially made the game lag was horrible, and looking at logcat output in eclipse it seemed to be happening whenever garbage collection occurs. After a question on this group a year or so ago I found out about the allocation tracker in the standalone DDMS tool and was able to get rid of the majority of my allocations. My code still creates some objects, but that is all part of string generation and I haven't put in the time to see if there is a decent way of generating a basic string using some numbers without causing allocations. I have 3 android devices, ADP1(1.5-HVGA), Tattoo(1.6-QVGA), and Nexus 1(2.1-WVGA) and they all have the same behavior in regards to the "lag" I see in this game. Basically playing the game after killing all tasks with Taskiller or Advanced Task Manager I can play the game with relatively little lag, once every minute or 2. However if I open my twitter client, facebook, browse the web for a few minutes, and then try to play this game I get lag at least every 20 seconds or so and every time I see this lag I see that garbage collection is happening in the log. I gave up on trying to solve this problem many months ago. The best I could ever do was call System.gc(); whenever there was a break in real time action, and cut down on allocations as much as possible. If I recall there is not much that you can do about other processes garbage collection, when the garbage collector starts up there is nothing that your app can do, so in a real time game that means the game loop gets put on hold, and by the time the game loop runs you have already missed a fraction of a second which means during that fraction of a second you cannot update the screen or calculate any of the game logic/physics and when the scree finally does get updated the user just sees "lag". If anyone has any suggestions on how to suppress the garbage collection done by other processes or how to write an app that can continue it's game loop / screen updating during the garbage collection I am all ears. ---snctln www.snctln.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
