What are the limits of using Lists?

[andymc]

I'm writing a few apps that use lists. I save and load these lists from files using the RandomAccessFile library to write lists of objects. This works well but what are the limits? What size will I start to hit problems with? I am not going to be using lists of thousands of objects, just a few hundred objects with a couple of short strings in each object at the most. All phones will handle this okay correct? I am developing using a Galaxy S2 but want to be sure the other less powerful phones can handle my apps okay without me having to resort to using a SQL database.

 

[Erel]

It really depends on the objects that you are storing. If the objects are not too large (like bitmaps for example) then it is not likely that you will hit any limit.

 

[andymc]

Great, thanks for the reply Erel. I'm most likely storing objects of strings, with the longest string in each object being around 200 bytes. Would an object in b4a of two strings of 100 characters each be as simple as 200 bytes? So a list of one hundred of these would be around 200x100 = 20000 bytes / 20kbytes?

 

[Erel]

The size will be slightly larger than 200 bytes. However you do not need to worry about 20kb.

 

[andymc]

Great, thanks.

are there any general guidelines for how much memory to try to stick to with your apps to stop memory problems? Or is it just using lots of bitmaps that I need to watch out for?

 

[Erel]

Each process is allocated 16mb of memory.

All of the memory issues that I recall reading on the forum were related to large bitmaps.