Decrease build time and application size by 60%

This is the presentation of the talk I gave in the MAD meetup on 15th April. This talk basically explains different tricks & tweaks to decrease your application size and your Gradle build time.

If you have any queries or any feedback, hit me on twitter: https://twitter.com/kevalpatel2106

Transcript

1. Decrease build time and application size by 60% Keval Patel Android Developer @multidots 1
2. Agenda - What is Gradle? How does it work? - Why decrease application build time? - How to decrease application build time? - Introduction to APK analyzer - Why is APK size so important? - How to trim your APK? 2
3. What is Gradle? - Very powerful build system - Written in Groovy & Java - Open source - Flexible dependency management - Task based 3
4. What Gradle does? - Building .dx files from java source. - Merge all the resources and assets. - Generates .apk from the source code. 4
5. How to decrease application build time? PART 1: 5
6. Why you should care about your build time? Let’s say, - You are generating 15 clean builds every day. - Each build takes 3 minutes to generate. - Total time: 15 * 3 = 45 mins. - If you work for 8 hours a day, that’s almost 10% of your work time. - That’s about 4 hours a week !!! 6
7. Less build time More time for productive stuff Better app with less bugs Happy users Less Build Time = More Productivity Why you should care about your build time? 7
8. Benchmarking with I/O’16 Application - Open source (https://github.com/google/iosched) - 25+ dependencies and third party libraries - 41538 method references 8
9. - Two modules: - android: Contains android application classes and resources. - server: Contains codebase for backend server. - Minimum SDK - 16 - Target SDK - 22/23 - 9 different languages Benchmarking with I/O’16 Application 9
10. Gradle build life cycle 1. Initialization 2. Configuration 3. Execution - Initialize resources - Start daemon thread - Figure out what to build - Evaluate your build.gradle script - Configure all the plugins - Evaluate the task graph. - Runs all the previously evaluated task - Build the application. 10
11. --profile will tell gradle to measure the time taken to execute each task and dump that data into HTML file. --profile your gradle build time $ ./gradlew assembleDebug You can find that report under /[your project dir]/build/reports/profile directory. Sample 11 --profile
12. Initilization Configuration Execution 12
13. How to decrease Configuration time? 13
14. - --dry-run tells gradle to evaluate the project but don’t run any task. - The last phase of the life cycle (execution phase) won’t get executed. - Tells us the time required by Gradle to configure the project and to start the build. Measure time required to configure 14
15. Measure time required to configure $ ./gradlew assembleDebug --dry-run --profile 15
16.  — configure-on-demand $ ./gradlew assembleDebug --dry-run --configure-on-demand --profile 16
17. How to decrease Initialization time? 17
18. Gradle Daemon - Gradle runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and uses several supporting libraries to be load at initialization time. That's why it's slow to start. More info : https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/gradle_daemon.html - Gradle Daemon is a long-lived process that will run in the background. - Avoid the cost of JVM startup for every build, - Able to cache information about project structure, files, tasks, and more in memory. 18
19. Commands for Gradle Daemon - To enable daemon for gradle build use --daemon. - To get a list of running Gradle Daemons and their statuses use the --status command. - To stop daemon use --stop command. 19 More info : https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/gradle_daemon.html
20. Gradle Daemon $ ./gradlew assembleDebug --dry-run --configure-on-demand --daemon --profile Initialization time decreased by 4.1 seconds than before after running the build for the second time. Speed improvements will apply for subsequent builds. 20
21. How to decrease Execution time? 21
22. Dex in the process - “Dex in process” is a process that allows to run multiple dex processes to run within the single VM that is also shared with the gradle. - Requirement: - Build tool version 23.0.2 or above. - Android Studio 2.0 or above. 22
23. Dex in the process - Multiple dx processes runs on different VM instances. - These increases build time as each dx has to pass data between different VM instances. - Requires less per VM heap size as single VM is hosting only single dx process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SY5nkNVUn0 23
24. Dex in the process Starting from AS 2.0, - All these dx processes run in the single VM and that VM is also shared with the gradle. - Require higher hip size to run as much as possible dx processes in a single instance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SY5nkNVUn0 24
25. Dex in the process Add below line in your /gradle.properties file to re-configure the heap size. org.gradle.jvmargs= -Xmx3072m -XX:MaxPermSize= 512m -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError -Dfile.encoding=UTF -8 - Select the best suitable heap size for your system based on the amount of RAM available. - Generally, after 4GB, any further increase in heap size won’t affect the build time. 25
26. Enable parallel builds - If you have multiple modules in you project, then by enabling this, gradle can run build operations for independent modules parallelly. - Gradle will only build modules parallelly if two modules are not interdependent. Google I/O project doesn’t have multiple modules, building parallel won’t make much difference. 26
27. Enable parallel builds Add below line in your /gradle.properties file to enable parallel builds. org.gradle.parallel=true 27
28. Other small things to remember… - Avoid heavy computations, like increasing the version code from git commits count or downloading some files from URL while building the project. - Always use latest gradle version. (Current is 3.4.1) - Don’t use dynamic dependency. compile 'com.android.support:appcompat-v7:23.0.+' compile 'com.android.support:appcompat-v7:23.0.1' 28
29. TL;DR #Enable daemon org.gradle.daemon=true # Try and find out the best heap size for your project build. org.gradle.jvmargs=-Xmx2048m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 # Modularise your project and enable parallel build org.gradle.parallel=true # Enable configure on demand. org.gradle.configureondemand=true - Add below line in your /gradle.properties. - Modularize your project. 29
30. How to decrease application size? PART 2: 30
31. Why APK size is so important? - Because you want to get your next billion users. - Mobile devices have limited amount of battery, limited storage, limited processing power, limited RAM, limited internet connectivity… - Currently, more than 11000 android devices are out in the market and most of them are having low-end configurations. - Two key things that are precious to every smartphone user, 1) Storage. 2) Network connectivity. 31
32. Storage - Most low-mid range devices have 8GB to 16GB internal storage. - The less storage your application uses, the more free space user gets to store their videos and images. - You don’t want your user to uninstall your application because of “Storage out of space” notification. 32
33. Network connectivity - Most of the android users are from developing countries (like India, Brazil or countries in Africa) where they have very limited 2G/3G connectivity. - If your application is large in size, it will take a longer time to download the application. - Most of the users have limited amount of data. - Every byte user uses to download the application, will affect your user’s wallet. 33
34. Breakdown your APK using APK Analyser 34
35. APK Analyser Provides immediate insight into the composition of your APK. Features: - View file size and the download size of the APK - View AndroidManifest.xml - View resources - View dex files and method counts for each dex files. - Compare two APK files. 35
37. Breakdown of APK - APK file mainly contains 3 major components which utilize the maximum amount of size in whole apk package: 1. classes.dex - dex file which contains bytecode of your java classes. 2. res - Contains images, icons and raw files, menu files, and layouts. 3. resources.arsc - Holds all the value resources. This resource contains strings, dimensions, styles, integers, view ids etc. 37
38. Reducing the size of classes.dex file 38
39. Proguard - A Java class file shrinker, optimizer, obfuscator, and preverifier. - It detects and removes unused classes, fields, methods, and attributes. It optimizes bytecode and removes unused instructions. - It renames the remaining classes, fields, and methods using short meaningless names to prevent reverse engineering of your apk file. 39
40. How to apply proguard? - You have two default proguard files bundled in your SDK that you can apply. - proguard-android.txt - contains light-weight proguard rules. - proguard-android-optimize.txt - contains very aggressive obfuscation and shrinking rules. release { //Enable the proguard minifyEnabled true proguardFiles getDefaultProguardFile('proguard-android-optimize.txt'), "proguard-rules.pro" } 40
41. Let’s see the results… Before: After: Size decreased from 3.1 MB to 1.98MB. (~50% decrease) 41
42. Reducing the size of res folder and resources.arsc 42
43. Enable “shrinkResources” - Many unused images and strings (e.g. resources for sign in with google button images) those are not used in your entire application. - Most of these unused images/resources are from third party libraries (e.g. Google Play Services). 43
44. Enable “shrinkResources” - Remove all the resources (images/strings), those are not used anywhere in the project. - To enable this in your build, add below lines: release{ //... //... shrinkResources true //... } 44
45. Set “resConfigs” - Libraries like Google Play Services contains resources from different locales. - Your application does not support all locales. - Provide the list of locales your application supports and “resConfigs” will remove all the resources for not supported locales. defaultConfig { //... //strip other than english resources resConfigs "en" } 45
46. Convert your png images to webp - webp is image format like png but having less size than png image with the same quality. - webp is natively supported by Android since the beginning. So you can load webp images in ImageView same as other raster images. - Android Studio 2.3 provides a built-in tool that can convert your png images to webp. 46
47. How to convert png images to webp? - Right-click on the image and select “Convert to webp”. - Select quality of the output image. - Select whether to convert transparent images to webp or not. - Hit “OK”. That’s it!! 47
48. Let’s see the results… Before: 48
49. Let’s see the results… After: res folder size decreased from 710KB to 597KB. (Decrease by 16%) 49
50. Final comparison * This are the results from the current version of the Anti-Theft apk. So, numbers are different than previous slides. 50
51. TL;DR • Enable proguard in your project by adding following lines to your release build type. • Enable “shrinkResources”. • Strip down all the unused locale resources by adding required resources name in “resConfigs”. • Convert all the images to the webp or vector drawable. 51
52. How to decrease your Gradle build time by 65%? http://bit.ly/2jvi9XB How you can decrease application size by 60% (In only 5 minutes)? http://bit.ly/2mWQQIc 52 References:
53. Thank you @kevalpatel2106 53 medium.com/@kevalpatel2106