May 2014
Intermediate to advanced
280 pages
6h 27m
English
Content preview from Efficient Android ThreadingBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 3. Threads on Android
Every Android application is started with numerous threads that are bundled with the Linux process and the Dalvik VM to manage its internal execution. But the application is exposed to system threads, like the UI and binder threads, and creates background threads of its own. In this chapter, we’ll get under the hood of threading on the Android platform, examining the following:
- Differences and similarities between UI, binder, and background threads
- Linux thread coupling
- How thread scheduling is affected by the application process rank
- Running Linux threads
Android Application Threads
All application threads are based on the native pthreads in Linux with a Thread representation in Java, but the platform still assigns special properties to threads that make them differ. From an application perspective, the thread types are UI, binder, and background threads.
UI Thread
The UI thread is started on application start and stays alive during the lifetime of the Linux process. The UI thread is the main thread of the application, used for executing Android components and updating the UI elements on the screen. If the platform detects that UI updates are attempted from any other thread, it will promptly notify the application by throwing a CalledFromWrongThreadException. This harsh platform behavior is required because the Android UI Toolkit is not thread safe, so the runtime allows access to the UI elements from one thread only.
Note
UI elements in Android are ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.