android mapview slow and unresponsive

Issue

In my app mapview works great on some phones and very poorly on other phones. it seems to be a RAM issue, ie. phones with a lot of ram and a lot of heap work great and smoothly, phones without work very poorly.

I am recycling bitmaps and clearing things, but it doesn't seem to help. During app development it seemed kind of random when some phones would have issues with the mapview, but now it seems very consistent.

Basically on phones that don't work well, the mapview tiles load slowly, other parts of the app function very slowly, and the google map search does not give search suggestions or update the map with the address searched for.

On phones that do work, mapview tiles load quickly, other parts of the app function very quickly, the google map search gives search suggestions and the map updates exactly as desired.

what causes this and how would I improve it? (it is standard mapview code)

I saw a similar question about "android mapview is slow", basically was my problem, but the solution was irrelevant for me, how do apps that use mapview account for this?

Solution

Well you don't actually supply any code, but have you considered that the problem might be related to something else than the mapview? Or have you considered that perhaps you could improve the performance in other ways? There isn't much you can do with the mapview itself to improve performance.

You could investigate if the mapview slow without overlays. I recently found out my implementation of itemizedoverlay was bad because I was adding items and calling populate every time I added a new item instead of calling populate when I was done adding items. This didn't give any problems before (without tab layout) but with the tabs it worked really slow.

Another thing you could try was to go away from tabs with activities (I assume you do this now) and use tabs with fragments instead. And yes this is possible with mapview just dl one of the many fragmentmapactivities or make your own fragmentmapactivity.

Answered By - Warpzit