Animating TextView with custom font causes heavy work to font cache

Question

I have a TextView for which i register the following animation:

mScaleAnimation = new ScaleAnimation(1f, 1.2f, 1f, 1.2f,
            mReferenceTextView.getWidth() / 2, mReferenceTextView
                    .getHeight() / 2);
    mScaleAnimation.setRepeatCount(Animation.INFINITE);
    mScaleAnimation.setRepeatMode(Animation.REVERSE);
    mScaleAnimation.setDuration(500);

It works fine and looks really cool :)

My only concern is the following: When i look at logcat, it is totally unusable since as long as the animation ist running, i keep getting these logs over and over multiple times a second :(

06-20 17:50:05.555: DEBUG/skia(14179): purging 213K from font cache [7 entries]
06-20 17:50:05.750: DEBUG/skia(14179): purging 196K from font cache [7 entries]
06-20 17:50:05.870: DEBUG/skia(14179): purging 202K from font cache [8 entries]
06-20 17:50:05.995: DEBUG/skia(14179): purging 190K from font cache [8 entries]

The TextView uses a custom font/typeface (which is in otf format).

Any ideas what causes that heavy work for the font cache?

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:55

1

I believe that your cache is getting killed because you are generating tons of TypeFace objects. I'm guessing that this is on a pre ICS release? There is a bug that holds TypeFaces and does not free it up correctly. So when your animating, it keeps creating new objects for each position and they are leaked and never cleaned up.

I found someone's suggestion to create a TypeFace cache with a HashMap. You can check this post out for more details. Custom fonts and XML layouts (Android)

edited May 23 '17 at 11:55

Community

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answered Aug 04 '12 at 17:37

Frank Sposaro

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I'm only creating the TypeFace object once in the Activity class, not when creating the animation or something like that. – Goddchen Aug 05 '12 at 18:53
Yes. I understand your are only creating it once. But the system is creating more. And the bug that I linked to is not freeing them up properly. – Frank Sposaro Aug 05 '12 at 18:58

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 28 '15 at 11:39

If you're constantly changing the actual font size, Both Skia and HWUI will be constantly re rasterising and recaching new glyphs of the right size. Memory usage can grow very quickly and performance will nosedive. You shouldn't get this issue if you're just scaling the canvas, but then you wont get the quality either.

Animating TextView with custom font causes heavy work to font cache

2 Answers2