Android contentprovider insert takes a lot of time

Question

I made my own contentprovider where I put a lot of data in at once with multiple inserts.

The app will receive the data from an external source and at this moment I receive about 30 items (therefor 30 times an insert).

Now I noticed that this takes a lot of precious time (about 3 seconds, 100ms on each insert).

How can I improve the speed of the contentprovider? I already tried to bulkInsert them all together but them it will take up to 5 sec.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

wrap all that in insertBulk into transactions.

Example:

    SQLiteDatabase sqlDB = mDB.getWritableDatabase();
    sqlDB.beginTransaction();
    try {

        for (ContentValues cv : values) {
            long newID = sqlDB.insertOrThrow(table, null, cv);
            if (newID <= 0) {
                throw new SQLException("Failed to insert row into " + uri);
            }
        }
        sqlDB.setTransactionSuccessful();
        getContext().getContentResolver().notifyChange(uri, null);
        numInserted = values.length;
    } finally {
        sqlDB.endTransaction();
    }

bulkInsert does not use transactions by default, since the default behavior just calls insert:

Override this to handle requests to insert a set of new rows, or the default implementation will iterate over the values and call insert(Uri, ContentValues) on each of them.

Answer 2

doing the inserts in a transaction greatly improves the speed, since only one write to the actuall database takes place:

db.beginTransaction();
try {
    // do the inserts
    db.setTransactionSuccessful()
} finally {
    db.endTransaction();
}

I was once experimenting trying to improve the write speed of about ~2000 writes, and this was the only big improvement I found.

Doing db.setLockingEnabled(false) i think gave about 1% improvement, but then you must also make sure no other threads write to the db. Removing redundant indexes can also give a minor boost if the table is huge.