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onTrimMemory(): Called when the operating system has determined that it is a good time for a process to trim unneeded memory from its process. This will happen for example when it goes in the background and there is not enough memory to keep as many background processes running as desired.
Android can reclaim memory for from your app in several ways or kill your app entirely if necessary to free up memory for critical tasks. To help balance the system memory and avoid the system's need to kill your app process, you can implement the ComponentCallbacks2 interface in your Activity classes. The provided onTrimMemory() callback method allows your app to listen for memory related events when your app is in either the foreground or the background, and then release objects in response to app lifecycle or system events that indicate the system needs to reclaim memory.
An AsyncTask is not tied to the life cycle of the Activity that contains it. So, for example, if you start an AsyncTask inside an Activity and the user rotates the device, the Activity will be destroyed (and a new Activity instance will be created) but the AsyncTask will not die but instead goes on living until it completes.
Then, when the AsyncTask does complete, rather than updating the UI of the new Activity, it updates the former instance of the Activity (i.e., the one in which it was created but that is not displayed anymore!). This can lead to an Exception (of the type java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: View not attached to window manager if you use, for instance, findViewById to retrieve a view inside the Activity).
There’s also the potential for this to result in a memory leak since the AsyncTask maintains a reference to the Activity, which prevents the Activity from being garbage collected as long as the AsyncTask remains alive.
For these reasons, using AsyncTasks for long-running background tasks is generally a bad idea . Rather, for long-running background tasks, a different mechanism (such as a service) should be employed.
Note: AsyncTasks by default run on a single thread using a serial executor, meaning it has only 1 thread and each task runs one after the other.
Job Scheduling api, as the name suggests, allows to schedule jobs while letting the system optimize based on memory, power, and connectivity conditions.
The JobScheduler supports batch scheduling of jobs. The Android system can combine jobs so that battery consumption is reduced. JobManager makes handling uploads easier as it handles automatically the unreliability of the network. It also survives application restarts.
Scenarios -
- Tasks that should be done once the device is connect to a power supply
- Tasks that require network access or a Wi-Fi connection.
- Task that are not critical or user facing
- Tasks that should be running on a regular basis as batch where the timing is not critical
Handlers are objects for managing threads. It receives messages and writes code on how to handle the message. They run outside of the activity’s lifecycle, so they need to be cleaned up properly or else you will have thread leaks.
Handlers allow communicating between the background thread and the main thread.
A Handler class is preferred when we need to perform a background task repeatedly after every x seconds/minutes.
Android service is a component that is used to perform operations on the background such as playing music. It doesn’t has any UI (user interface). The service runs in the background indefinitely even if application is destroyed.
AsyncTask allows you to perform asynchronous work on your user interface. It performs the blocking operations in a worker thread and then publishes the results on the UI thread, without requiring you to handle threads and/or handlers yourself.
IntentService is a base class for Services that handle asynchronous requests (expressed as Intents) on demand. Clients send requests through startService(Intent) calls; the service is started as needed, handles each Intent in turn using a worker thread, and stops itself when it runs out of work.
A thread is a single sequential flow of control within a program. Threads can be thought of as mini-processes running within a main process.
Thread should be used to separate long running operations from main thread so that performance is improved. But it can't be cancelled elegantly and it can't handle configuration changes of Android. You can't update UI from Thread.
AsyncTask can be used to handle work items shorter than 5ms in duration. With AsyncTask, you can update UI unlike java Thread. But many long running tasks will choke the performance.
Service is the base class for Android services that can be extended to create any service. A class that directly extends Service runs on the main thread so it will block the UI (if there is one) and should therefore either be used only for short tasks or should make use of other threads for longer tasks.
IntentService is a subclass of Service that handles asynchronous requests (expressed as “Intents”) on demand. Clients send requests through startService(Intent) calls. The service is started as needed, handles each Intent in turn using a worker thread, and stops itself when it runs out of work.
A Service is an application component that can perform long-running operations in the background, and it doesn't provide a user interface. It can run in the background, even when the user is not interacting with your application. These are the three different types of services:
Foreground Service: A foreground service performs some operation that is noticeable to the user. For example, we can use a foreground service to play an audio track. A Notification must be displayed to the user.
Background Service: A background service performs an operation that isn’t directly noticed by the user. In Android API level 26 and above, there are restrictions to using background services and it is recommended to use WorkManager in these cases.
Bound Service: A service is bound when an application component binds to it by calling bindService(). A bound service offers a client-server interface that allows components to interact with the service, send requests, receive results. A bound service runs only as long as another application component is bound to it.
The most common approach these days would be to use a combination of ViewModels and onSaveInstanceState(). So how we do we that?
Basics of ViewModel: A ViewModel is LifeCycle-Aware. In other words, a ViewModel will not be destroyed if its owner is destroyed for a configuration change (e.g. rotation). The new instance of the owner will just re-connected to the existing ViewModel. So if you rotate an Activity three times, you have just created three different Activity instances, but you only have one ViewModel.
So the common practice is to store data in the ViewModel class (since it persists data during configuration changes) and use OnSaveInstanceState to store small amounts of UI data.
For instance, let’s say we have a search screen and the user has entered a query in the Edittext. This results in a list of items being displayed in the RecyclerView. Now if the screen is rotated, the ideal way to prevent resetting of data would be to store the list of search items in the ViewModel and the query text user has entered in the OnSaveInstanceState method of the activity.
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