High memory usage on application start in Android

Issue

I'm making a basic android application, but it is suffering from a LOT of garbage collection (the GC kicks in 4-5 times every second). I tried looking for the root cause and realized that my app has almost no memory as soon as the onCreate function is called.

As soon as the app starts, the DDMS shows almost 91% of the heap being used, mostly by 1-byte arrays. I also ran the memory analysis tool to see if I was leaking memory or something, and even after executing the app, it shows that most of the memory is used up by android.content.res.resources.

Why is my application losing so much memory to resources? The ONLY resource that my app has is a small JPEG image of 22KB. I read elsewhere that sometimes the free heap is misreported because of shared resources etc, but then the GC shouldn't kick in as often as it does when the app is running. Can someone help?

FWIW, the very same app run on a Galaxy S3 shows about 20% heap usage at the start, even though it shows the same amount of total memory (~10 MB). The problematic phone is a Galaxy S2.

Solution

Upgraded the phone to Cyanogenmod 10.1, and now the heap usage is ~30% at the start and the GC doesn't kick in anymore. Maybe a bug in the Samsung firmware?

Answered By - Anuj Jain