SoftReference gets garbage collected too early

Question

I'm on my way with implementing a caching mechanism for my Android application.

I use SoftReference, like many examples I've found. The problem is, when I scroll up or down in my ListView, the most of the images are already cleared. I can see in LogCat that my application is garbage collected everytime the application loads new images. That means that the most of the non-visible images in the ListView are gone.

So, everytime I scroll back to an earlier position (where I really downloaded images before) I have to download the images once again - they're not cached.

I've also researched this topic. According to Mark Murphy in this article, it seems that there is (or was?) a bug with the SoftReference. Some other results indicates the same thing (or the same result); SoftReferences are getting cleared too early.

Is there any working solution?

Answer 1

SoftReference are the poor mans Cache. The JVM can hold those reference alive longer, but doesn't have to. As soon as there's no hard reference anymore, the JVM can garbage collect a the soft-referenced Object. The behavior of the JVM you're experiencing is correct, since the JVM doesn't have to hold such object longer around. Of course most JVMs try to keep the soft reference object alive to some degree.

Therefore SoftReferences are kind of a dangerous cache. If you really want to ensure a caching-behavior, you need a real cache. Like a LRU-cache. Especially if you're caching is performance-critical, you should use a proper cache.

Answer 2

From Android Training site:

http://developer.android.com/training/displaying-bitmaps/cache-bitmap.html

In the past, a popular memory cache implementation was a SoftReference or WeakReference bitmap cache, however this is not recommended. Starting from Android 2.3 (API Level 9) the garbage collector is more aggressive with collecting soft/weak references which makes them fairly ineffective. In addition, prior to Android 3.0 (API Level 11), the backing data of a bitmap was stored in native memory which is not released in a predictable manner, potentially causing an application to briefly exceed its memory limits and crash.

More information in link.

We shoud use LruCache instead.