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Introducing the new Android Runtime - ART

Thanks for all the info EarlyMon! Btw, have you decided on a new phone yet?

You know, I really haven't.

I'm not *unhappy* with what I have now (rooted and screaming Evo 4G LTE) and I'm not *unhappy* with Sprint, but I'm going to wait a little bit longer and see if I might not prefer to switch to T-Mobile.

CM 11 just dropped today for my LTEvo, official Sense 5/4.3 is just around the corner, better Sense 5 rooted already exists, so I have a lot of room to play.

I expect to see ART supported pretty soon. :)
 
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You know, I really haven't.

I'm not *unhappy* with what I have now (rooted and screaming Evo 4G LTE) and I'm not *unhappy* with Sprint, but I'm going to wait a little bit longer and see if I might not prefer to switch to T-Mobile.

CM 11 just dropped today for my LTEvo, official Sense 5/4.3 is just around the corner, better Sense 5 rooted already exists, so I have a lot of room to play.

I expect to see ART supported pretty soon. :)

That's one of the reasons I really like the nexus 5. I could pop in a T-Mobile or ATT SIM when my sprint contracts up and never miss a beat.

PS. Haven't gotten a chance to do the ART test you described yet. Sorry about that :eek:.
 
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I just learned about ART while on G+. I decided to give it a try. I had already ran some benchmarks before on Dalvik.

Here are the results


AnTuTu:

Dalvik: 24,745
ART: 27,546

There was an increase of 2,801

Quadrant (I don't have the full version)

Dalvik: 9,407 (That's what I remember)
ART: 12,072

There was an increase of 2,665
 
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I just learned about ART while on G+. I decided to give it a try. I had already ran some benchmarks before on Dalvik.

Here are the results


AnTuTu:

Dalvik: 24,745
ART: 27,546

There was an increase of 2,801

Quadrant (I don't have the full version)

Dalvik: 9,407 (That's what I remember)
ART: 12,072

There was an increase of 2,665

Did you notice less available space on your phone? Using ART, as I understand it, will cause apps to take up more storage space. How much more I don't know but I assume it is on an app by app basis.
 
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Someone did some vids with a pair of N7s.
Side by side video - ART vs Dalvik on N7 2013 : Android

Seems about right from my experience.

Compiling the app at install time just makes sense from a backwards compatibility standpoint.

Obviously if Android was new today then doing this at compile time (when the developer compiles it) would make more sense.

I wonder if this was started because of the Oracle patent trial...
 
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If Oracle had won, they would have had to toss the SDK (or buy a license). It was less about Dalvik and more about using "Java" and its respective trademarks and whatnot. But luckily the judge realized Oracle was being ridiculous.


Dalvik was already a clean-room design.

Cool videos though, seem to be a lot on youtube.


Going to try my N5 now. Because ART. :)
 
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I have been running using ART for 2 days now and my Nexus 5 seems to be just as fast if not even faster, especially loading apps. (except tiny deathstar which takes ages now?) and the battery life would seem to have improved as well. My "Ok Google" function does seem to be playing up a bit since the change, but that may be a coincidence. None of my 135 installed apps had any problem being re compiled at boot and so far I havent had any issues. I lost about 400mb of space after the change with 135 apps installed.
 
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Not exactly what you wanted, but maybe a start

As you know, I don't put much stock in benchmarks, they're very limited.

My only expectation at this stage is that load times are reduced.

I think performance benchmarks are premature when we know that not all apps runs with it.

Java/Dalvik works INSANELY well for well-designed apps.

I think it's possible that some people think that because there's a big difference between native and Java apps on a PC, there's supposed to be in Android.

However - the Android Dalvik Virtual Machine is not the Oracle Java VM, and this isn't a desktop environment windowing overlay - in our case, apps provide the desktop.


I don't have any expectations for performance increases beyond load times at this point, one way or the other.


That said, I do appreciate the link. :)

We have an idea of the storage cost increase thanks to CarsnGadgets.

Now I'm just curious about the runtime memory footprint.

The storage cost is rational and understandable - now the question is does that get offset by the ram costs or not.

And both could change in future releases.
 
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Here's a very simplistic way of explaining it. This is not 100% accurate and is just meant to paint a picture.

The ideal situation for a program is to be done native to the device, as iOS apps are done. Think of it as the app and the OS as two people, and native means that they both speak the same language.

For Android, most apps are not native, but instead are based on Java. So, in this case, the app is a person speaking one language, and the OS is speaking another. So, they need a real-time translator, Dalvik. Dalvik translates on the fly but this real-time translation, or just-in-time (JIT), takes up resources.

The idea behind ART is that when an app is installed, they get translated immediately. So, anytime that you run an app after the installation completes, the app will run like a native app. For high-end devices you won't notice a difference in performance, but the system will notice. That CPU will have less overhead, not ramping up as high in terms of clock speed thus preserving some battery life.

The idea behind ART is that apps run as if they're native to the OS which helps to improve performance and reduce battery usage. The last time we saw this was when Dalvik got its JIT compiler in Android 2.2, which had a noticeable performance increase over the older method. You can expect something similar here once ART is fully taken advantage of (likely Android 4.5/5.x).
 
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Thanks bro i understand that. is this why people are reporting 10mins+ boot times when they first change to ART, after that the apps should be optimised to start faster?

Dalvik also has a long boot on its first run - when you see the "Android is upgrading..." message, Dalvik is examining all the non-native apps and doing a little bit of optimization/translation for them. It places this optimized code in the Dalvik Cache (so that's what that is, in case you were curious to know what you wipe when flashing). Dalvik only does a little bit of optimization ahead of time though - most is done at run time, and that optimization gets stored in RAM instead of the persistent Dalvik cache.

ART does the same cache-building when it is first enabled too, but since it does much more optimization ahead of time it takes much longer to build that initial cache. By the way, since ART puts more data in its cache (and thus less optimization code in RAM) it will require more storage space per app than Dalvik - make sure you've got a few GB free before switching to ART! Otherwise you may run into a boot that never ends (ask how I know...).
 
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Thanks man. Take it you mean a few free GB of storage? Thats cool i did a huge clearout the other day n like halved my internal storage use lol :)
Im not gona shift fully to 4.4 yet anyway so just gettin the groundwork in.
Im on an sgs3 and CM 11 runs lovely but i really like Xposed Framework which isnt compatible YET :)

P.s, switching from 4.4 to 4.3 nandroid and back again.. what issues could ART throw into the works?
 
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Thanks man. Take it you mean a few free GB of storage? Thats cool i did a huge clearout the other day n like halved my internal storage use lol :)
Im not gona shift fully to 4.4 yet anyway so just gettin the groundwork in.
Im on an sgs3 and CM 11 runs lovely but i really like Xposed Framework which isnt compatible YET :)

P.s, switching from 4.4 to 4.3 nandroid and back again.. what issues could ART throw into the works?

Yeah, a few GB free. I'm an app junkie; something like 225 apps installed when I made the switch to ART and the ~1GB I had free was clearly not enough. Somehow managed to get it to revert to Dalvik, removed some large apps, nuked some giant directories, and then made it back to ART without an issue.

I don't think that ART should make nandroiding any more difficult.
 
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Lol mate im bad at uninstalling apps too :D uploadfromtaptalk1384669579790.jpg
 
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