Monitoring the memory footprint

Memory footprints are the signs and ways of using memory during runtime. From the point of game memory usage optimization, monitoring the memory footprint is very important:

• Checking log messages

• Checking heap updates

• Tracking memory allocation

• Checking overall memory usage

• Tracking memory leaks

Checking log messages

Using log messages has been the most effective and immediate debugging technique. Message logs are very useful for tracking the program control flow and runtime object tracking.

Dalvik message log

The Dalvik message log is useful for tracking memory. Whenever garbage collection happens, the garbage collector can print the following information through Dalvik log messaging:

• Garbage collection reason: This info reveals the reason for triggering garbage collection. The reasons can be GC_CONCURRENT, GC_FOR_MALLOC, GC_HPROF_DUMP_HEAP, GC_EXPLICIT, or GC_EXTERNAL_ALLOC.

• Amount of memory freed: This section states the amount of memory freed by the garbage collector...