Efficiency of Android Layout hierarchy

Question

Does it (and in what way) effect performance to have a complex Layout hierarchy?

In what way does it affect an application to have deeply nested layouts (e.g. RealitiveLayout which contains many LinearLayouts which each contain....)

Answer 1

You can use hierarchyviewer to gauge the performance of your layout hierarchy. For more details see http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/debugging/debugging-ui.html

Answer 2

It has an effect, the simpler the better is the rule.

Every view — or worse, every layout manager — that you add to your application comes at a cost: initialization, layout and drawing become slower. The layout pass can be especially expensive when you nest several LinearLayout that use the weight parameter, which requires the child to be measured twice.

From: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/02/android-layout-tricks-1.html

Answer 3

Yes it does and more than 3 levels are supposedly not recommended. That is one reason why the new GridLayout was created. Also the lint and hierarchyviewer tools in the SDK will help you optimizing your layouts.

However depending on your needs you might have to nest deeper. Just use the SDK tools and some devices with hands on testing to see if your performance bottlenecks are with the rendering. Most likely they are somewhere else in your code..

One of the main performance slogs with regards to views is not the rendering but inflating them from xml files..