Dalvik Memory Allocation - How to change the default limits?

Question

I am currently considering to develop an application for processing of images captured by the camera of mobile phones using the Android OS. Before I make the decision to go

Answer 1

You can change the default global heap size via adb shell setprop, for instance:

   setprop dalvik.vm.heapsize 128m

Answer 2

On a usual device you cannot change the heap-limits of your application. They are hardcoded by the OEM. If you are developing for some device of which you have full control, you can modify Dalvik startup scripts to allow more heap space.

Answer 3

You may change this by changing vm.heapSize item in the avd's config.ini. For example, you may write

vm.heapSize=64

in config.ini. If there is no such item, you may add a new one.

However, please notice that vm.heapSize may be overridden by the skin. There is a hardware.ini in the skin's path, and it contains default settings of vm.heapSize and hw.ramSize which may override your value. To workaround this problem, you may set

skin.path=720x1280
skin.name=720x1280

The numbers are not important, it must be in the (width)x(height) form.