How Intents work internally?

Question

I developed an App and i executed some tests. This tests consists in sending data from one background service to another background service. All data was received when the transmission rate was low (4 intents/second). However when i increased the transmission rate (8 and 12 intents/second), some data (typically 2- 3 %) was not received by the destination service.

All intents were broadcasted and the services were running locally.

Can anyone tell me, how the OS treats the Intents and the whole mechanism works, in order to find the reason why data was not received by it's receiver ?

Best regards,

Answer 1

First of all, I would rather recommend to bind the service and then using Handlers for IPC. A good example can be found here: http://developer.android.com/guide/components/bound-services.html This is a lot faster and more reliable.

On how Intents work internally you can have a look at the source code: https://github.com/android/platform_frameworks_base/blob/master/core/java/android/app/ContextImpl.java#L893

Answer 2

Here are the relevant methods (you can see the first one geting called from the ContextImpl.broadcastIntent() method, see the link in Force's answer):

• ActivityManagerService.broadcastIntent()
• which in turn calls ActivityManagerService.broadcastIntentLocked()