I ran into a problem of slow builds and thought I'd share the solution. I'm porting an iPhone app to Android, and as soon as I added the images to the project (400+ pngs), build time went from about 5 seconds to about 40 seconds. This is on a new machine, quad core i7, 8GB ram.
The resource processor (aapt) was to blame. Every time I made a change to a layout xml file and hit save - bam, wait 40 seconds. After running aapt in verbose mode, it was obvious what was happening - aapt does png optimization every single time. Optimization is slow, and aapt only used one core. So it makes sense to turn this optimization off. Just run optipng once, no need to optimize every build or every time I save a layout xml file. So how do you turn png optimization off? You can't. There is no Eclipse setting, no command line option for aapt. Digging around the aapt source, I noticed something funny though - it only optimizes images in the "drawable" folders that end in ".png". http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=platform/frameworks/base.git;a=blob;f=tools/aapt/Images.cpp#l973 Solution: rename all the pngs to end in uppercase ".PNG". Then aapt simply copies the files without optimizing. My build time is back to 5 seconds! (Caveat: this won't work for nine-patch files - they still need to end in lowercase ".9.png".) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
