Volley ImageLoader really slow on older devices

Question

Has anyone been able to test Volley on older devices?

I have a ZTE Blade which has a single core 800mhz cpu.

I've found that Volley will just sit there waiting for 4-5 seconds or even longer before loading the images, even when they are already on disk.

The same code is absolutely blisteringly fast on my Galaxy S2 and Xoom.

I've used Universal-Image-Loader, and it has no problems on the older device, everything snappy.

Not really sure how to debug this.

I've even gone into the internals a bit even removing the sync object from the bitmap decode, but to absolutely no avail.

I have a new app to release and have had to release without pre-ICS support because of the performance is just so bad.

Answer 1

The behaviour of ImageLoader in Volley seems to be tuned for "pages" of thumbnails and not so much a much longer or contiguous stream. To that end, responses from the ImageLoader are actually delayed / batched up before being delivered. So images that are ready are not being delivered as soon as they possible can be to achieve a sort of page load aesthetic, aluded to briefly in the Google I/O talk.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhv8l9F44qo

You can remove this behaviour with the following

mImageLoader = new ImageLoader(mQueue, imageCache);
mImageLoader.setBatchedResponseDelay(0);

I'm not sure why this causes any problems at the end of the day though, because it's only meant to delay by 100ms, and I don't see it extending that delay based on new content arriving, but will continue to investigate and report back on anything else I find. But this does fix the responsiveness on older devices and newer devices are of course still buttery.