android - EditText Performance: Understanding GPU Process Time on Profile GPU Rendering

Question

I am investigating ways to improve performance in EditText, specifically in regards to load times. When loading large documents of a few thousand words or more, calling setText can freeze the UI for several seconds on some of my test devices and emulators.

In response, I have explored several possible solutions, none of which produce satisfactory results. I have tried to split large documents by paragraph, and load each paragraph into its own RecyclerView or ListView row. RecyclerView was completely hopeless due to a problem that causes jerky scrolling. ListView provided great, almost immediate, load times, and pretty good scrolling (although not as a good as one EditText block) but there is an issue where EditText blocks inside rows lose focus when selected. I have also attempted to update an EditText in sections from onProgressUpdate in an AsyncTask, hoping that the user could interact with the text as it loads in sections, but load times are largely unaffected.

The most promising avenue I have explored relates to changing the following element in AndroidManifest.xml:

    android:hardwareAccelerated="false"

I got the idea after watching the following segment from this YouTube clip on the Google Developers channel. When I switched on GPU Profile rendering, I discovered that the orange bar (representing "process time") was rocketing every time setText was called. When I switched off hardware acceleration, setText performance increased massively, although other areas (like scrolling) became much worse.

What I would like to understand is - why is this happening? Also, is there a way that I can use this information to further increase performance? Can I toggle hardware acceleration off and on again programatically simply?

It's worth mentioning some devices, like a Nexus 7 2013 running API 22, don't suffer any issues whatsoever when calling setText on large documents, whereas others really struggle with hardware acceleration on. I just want to understand what's going on better so I can attempt to fix it! Thanks.

EDIT:

Here is a link to a GitHub Repository for anyone to download one of my sample test apps to replicate the problems I listed above. I also have three videos I posted on the site demonstrating these issues, which I shall mirror below:

I have made three video demonstrations that show this app running on a Huawei Honor Holly running KitKat 4.4.2 with the hardwareAccelerated attribute set to true in the AndroidManifest, then with the same phone with the same attribute set to false, and a separate Nexus 7 (2013) running Lollipop 5.1 with hardware acceleration enabled. GPU Profiling is on in each case.

Honor Holly - Acceleration On

Honor Holly - Acceleration Off

Nexus 7 (2013) - Acceleration On

Answer 1

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