The Android Debug Monitor ToolĪs you can see from the screen shot above, on the left is a list of the attached device(s) that you may wish to monitor for memory usage. menu option.Īssuming your device is correctly configured with Visual Studio, then you should be presented with the Android Debug Monitor tool as above. If you haven't done this before, navigate to your Tools menu and click on the External Tools. To make things easier, you could add the Android Debug Monitor tool to your Visual Studio IDE. Navigate to your Android SDK folder (its location is described above) and double click on the monitor.bat file. The version of Android Debug Monitor used in this article was 22.3.0. There may be exceptions to this (for example, if your application is currently processing a background service), but broadly speaking, background applications will release their resources to the foreground application.įor the purposes of this article, it is assumed that you have installed the Android SDK. So any memory that is used by your application will be re-assigned to the foreground application. When this happens, Android deems the resources currently assigned to your application to be available for use by the foreground application. For example, when your application is closed, it is pushed onto the application stack (a list of currently running applications whereby one will be in the foreground and all the others are in the background). In common with the Microsoft.NET Framework, Android has an integrated garbage collector that works broadly in a very similar way, i.e., it will release memory when it is no longer required. Suffice to say that memory is managed in such a way as to make it highly efficient given that it is relatively more scarce when compared to higher spec desktop PCs and laptops. For this reason, memory is a valuable resource due to its relative scarcity (when compared to a higher spec desktop PC or laptop).Ī detailed description of how memory is managed by Android (or more specifically Android's Dalvik virtual machine) is beyond the scope of this article. BackgroundĪndroid applications by their very nature are intended to run on low powered, low memory devices including smart phones and tablets.

Although the article was written with Visual Studio and C# in mind, it also lends itself to Eclipse and Java. This article will describe how you can use this tool to diagnose memory usage in your Xamarin.Android applications.

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