Android: how to increase heap size at runtime?

Question

I have an image cache in my application which is implemented using SoftReferences. Dalvik starts applications with relatively small heap, and then increases it in case of de

Answer 1

Instead of increasing heap size you can do some thing better. As you said that you are maintaining cache in you application which is implemented using SoftReferences. The best thing is to use LruCache you can do some thing like this:

private LruCache bitmapCache;
final int memClass;
int cacheSize;

memClass = ((ActivityManager) context.getSystemService(
    Context.ACTIVITY_SERVICE)).getMemoryClass();

Return the approximate per-application memory class of the current device. This gives you an idea of how hard a memory limit you should impose on your application to let the overall system work best. The returned value is in megabytes; the baseline Android memory class is 16 (which happens to be the Java heap limit of those devices); some device with more memory may return 24 or even higher numbers.

cacheSize = 1024 * 1024 * memClass / 10;
bitmapCache = new LruCache(cacheSize) {
  @Override
  protected int sizeOf(String key, Bitmap value) {
    return value.getHeight() * value.getRowBytes();
 }
};

it will remove the bitmap images from LruCache if the memory exceeds the located memory to LruCache and load the new image in it.