How to reduce the time for sending data to remote server?

Question

E.g. there are 10MB data stored in my tablet. The data has a list structure. Each entry in the list is about 3500 Bytes.

Currently, I send one entry each time with the following codes:

    HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();
    HttpPost httppost = new HttpPost(ipport+ phpHandler);
    HttpResponse response = null;

    try {
        httppost.setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(nameValuePairs, "utf-8"));
        response = httpclient.execute(httppost);
    } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
    } catch (ClientProtocolException e) {
    } catch (IOException e) {
    }

But to send this 10MB data, it took a long time. Each sending of an entry takes about 1 second.

Any solution to improve the efficiency?

Compress it, e.g. With gzip – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen Mar 11 '13 at 13:17 — Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen, Mar 11 '13 at 13:17

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:32

You can build a JSON string object which contains all the entities and then compress it with gzip or any other compression scheme.

The benefit of building a JSON object is you can transmit all the objects as one request, instead of sending it separately. This would eliminate the latency of establishing a new connection everytime.

// your data list = listData
JSONArray newArray = new JSONArray();
for (int i = 0, lsize = listData.size(); i < lsize; i++) {
    try {
        newArray.put(i, listData.get(i));
    } catch (JSONException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
}

This code would build a JSONArray with all the elements in the listData (it should be a list of strings)

now you can easily convert the JSONArray to a string using

newArray.toString()

Now you can send this JSON string over the network, and you can easily deserialize a JSON object in any server side language.

As for Gzip compression, you might want to look at this link

Here is a question on SO about sending GZip compressed data over HTTP in android
GZip POST request with HTTPClient in Java

sounds interesting! Could you show some codes here? I'm not familiar with JSON and how to invoke gzip from Java. — JackWM, Mar 11 '13 at 13:23

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:11

I am agreeing with the answer of @Ahmed. you better use jSON string object then compress using gzip libray.

for JSON there are lots of helpful tutorials. following link is really helpful

http://www.vogella.com/articles/AndroidJSON/article.html

here you can see the simple way to write json

public void writeJSON() {
  JSONObject object = new JSONObject();
  try {
    object.put("name", "Jack Hack");
    object.put("score", new Integer(200));
    object.put("current", new Double(152.32));
    object.put("nickname", "Hacker");
  } catch (JSONException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
  }
}

and to compress and decompress using gzip Here i am adding some sample codes from the answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/6718707/931982

public static byte[] compress(String string) throws IOException {
    ByteArrayOutputStream os = new ByteArrayOutputStream(string.length());
    GZIPOutputStream gos = new GZIPOutputStream(os);
    gos.write(string.getBytes());
    gos.close();
    byte[] compressed = os.toByteArray();
    os.close();
    return compressed;
}

public static String decompress(byte[] compressed) throws IOException {
    final int BUFFER_SIZE = 32;
    ByteArrayInputStream is = new ByteArrayInputStream(compressed);
    GZIPInputStream gis = new GZIPInputStream(is, BUFFER_SIZE);
    StringBuilder string = new StringBuilder();
    byte[] data = new byte[BUFFER_SIZE];
    int bytesRead;
    while ((bytesRead = gis.read(data)) != -1) {
        string.append(new String(data, 0, bytesRead));
    }
    gis.close();
    is.close();
    return string.toString();
}

HTTP natively supports GZip of request/response bodies as part of its specification. Using HTTP client, the feature can be activated as is shown in the documentation examples at http://hc.apache.org/httpcomponents-client-ga/examples.html . Such a mecanism also allows for full body streaming which can reduce the memory footprint of the communication. — GPI, Mar 11 '13 at 13:38
The native mecanism also handles properly String to byte conversion, following HTTP header contents and norms, which the given sample may fail to do (as `string.getBytes` and `new String(byte[])` will rely on default JVM encoding, whereas the conversion should be done according to HTTP header information). — GPI, Mar 11 '13 at 13:49

How to reduce the time for sending data to remote server?

2 Answers2