Xamarin : Out of memory issue

Question

I have created a UI that is rich with PNG images for a Xamarin Android application, mostly images are assigned declaratively in the AXML layouts and range from 5 KB to 100 KB in size, unfortunately after running the application and navigating between Activities for sometime the application crashes with messages in the LogCat mentioning memory issues as follow

02-14 21:01:34.856: E/dalvikvm-heap(18277): Out of memory on a 4320016-byte allocation.

02-14 21:01:34.876: D/skia(18277): --- allocation failed for scaled bitmap

Also when I monitored the application using Xamarin Profiler, I found that the memory allocation chart goes up on launching an activity but doesn't go down on closing the activity (although I am using Finish method to close it), which means that the memory consumed by the activity does not get deallocated!

Any idea what could be the problem?

The file size is irrelevant. I can make a 10K file which needs more RAM than a 1MB file. What size are the bitmaps? Are you recycling the bitmaps in onStop()? — Simon, Feb 14 '15 at 19:32
I assume by the size of the Bitmap you mean size of the ImageView or the View using the images, I am using many images as backgrounds, so that's all the screen size, some backgrounds directly uses PNG files and others use xml files to tile a PNG image. The images are assigned to Views declaratively so I am not sure how to recycle them. — Sisyphus, Feb 14 '15 at 20:46
Displaying efficiently http://developer.android.com/training/displaying-bitmaps/index.html make sure your bitmaps are eligible for collection. You could take it a step further with weak references. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28519203/xamarin-out-of-memory-issue — ClintL, Feb 16 '15 at 18:41

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 11 '15 at 15:02

1

We had exact same issue, and we had to remove background image to resolve it. I am not sure why Xamarin hasn't received bug report for this.

answered Jul 11 '15 at 15:02

Wei Ma

3,125
6
44
72

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:01

0

I had the same issue recently and I solved it by calling GC.Collect() whenever the problematic activity gets closed

edited May 23 '17 at 12:01

Community

1
1

answered Dec 26 '15 at 19:26

xleon

6,201
3
36
52

score -1 · Answer 3 · edited Dec 27 '15 at 04:52

-1

Add below line in your manifest file,

android:largeHeap="true"

edited Dec 27 '15 at 04:52

prasun

7,073
9
41
59

answered Dec 27 '15 at 04:32

charlin agramonte

707
6
11

1

That would only hide the problem for a while – xleon Dec 30 '15 at 17:17

Xamarin : Out of memory issue

3 Answers3