Memory Management in Android

Some commonly encountered memory management issues in Android:

http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/01/avoiding-memory-leaks.html

• Ensure that Activity Context objects don't outlive their Activities.
• Note when callbacks are likely to cause issues with circular references or major items not being GC'ed

Other notes from experience and research:

• The HTC Dream has 16MB of Heap Memory.
• The debugger does not report heap utilized by bitmaps, resulting in OutOfMemoryError even when heap consumption is reported at merely 2MB.
• Ensure that all threads are killed.
• Watchout for circular references.
• Inflated bitmaps are 2 bytes per pixel if no alpha, and 4 bytes per pixel if has alpha.

Some useful links:

• http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers/browse_thread/thread/a127b36e22d8753e
• http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers/browse_thread/thread/421630081b74d677/cbafa86c0fced44e
• http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers/browse_thread/thread/6659aaf069e462d2/da637fbe5ac0d631
• http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers/browse_thread/thread/ea6d4983289e74c3/0c00a53238f044be
• http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/02/track-memory-allocations.html