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by on_and_off 3949 days ago
The Android Framework team has been working on improving the runtime and its garbage collector for quite some time. There have been many improvements to the garbage collection strategy. With ART on Lollipop, according to its creator, there should never be a visible GC pause when the app is in the foreground. More information here : http://www.anandtech.com/show/8231/a-closer-look-at-android-... and in various I/O talks. Extremely bad code will still cause problems (but that's true for whatever memory management strategy you rely on) but in my experience, on a nexus 5, GC pauses are no longer a real issue on Android.

Still, Samsung is here to samsung things up. Comparisons of scrolling performances between a flagship samsung device and a nexus are just as expected : https://www.reddit.com/r/GalaxyS6/comments/3ck9no/scrolling_...

That's another topic entirely, but I think that another key factor is to move almost as much as possible of the UI work to a separate thread, not just to make heavy work in the background. It is starting to happen with ripple animations on a RenderThread, but I think that this strategy could be generalized.

2 comments

> Still, Samsung is here to samsung things up

3rd time I've laughed with more than 60% intensity at something I read on the internet in the last 2 years. thank you!!! hahahaaha

for reference, my last 100% laugh that returned me to the days of cartoons and childhood was this comment about how to install and activate your non-rental-Cable-modem: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/27szuw/comcast_...

On my tablet (not nexus) with Android 5.0 I can surely see when everything comes to a stall.
Tablets are indeed complex.

At best they have the same SOC as a good phone but they typically have way more pixels to carry around.

NoName Chinese tablets are often a disaster and even high end tablets are hard to get right.

Even putting graphics aside, things like a slow internal memory can also wreak performances.

might be 5.0 mem leak issues and general bugs