CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidperformancesqliteipc
satur9nine
satur9nine

Reputation: 15072

Android ContentProvider Performance

I'm curious if anyone has done any performance testing on querying a ContentProvider via ContentResolver vs querying a SQLiteDatabase object in the same process. I'm guessing that a ContentResolver query passes back a Cursor that communicates with the database through a Binder (Android IPC). This means that if I read the contents of 100 records through the Cursor that would result 100 Binder method calls. Are my guesses correct and if so would that be significantly slower than accessing the database in the same process?

Upvotes: 16

Views: 4000

Answers (2)

3c71
3c71

Reputation: 4521

There's no definitive answer and results depends on what and how you do it.

For example, I want to share preferences between apps so ContentProvider seems the perfect answer. Yes if I don't mind a longer delay on first read as just connecting to a ContentProvider takes 120ms on a S10+ these days!

So if you have a UI depends on those settings, you'd better copy the preference file between apps (using a ContentProvider) and then read from the file directly otherwise the UI will be delayed before showing with appropriate theme. Fact is the onStart() will have already been called for the newly created activity.

On the opposite side doing DB operations (if done right) will not change much of the results, unless you need to re-connect frequently as it will add a non neglectable overhead.

Upvotes: 0

Fernwilter
Fernwilter

Reputation: 134

I have not done exactly that meassure. What I did was to meassure the performance of multiple inserts via a ContentProvider or directly via a SQLite database. I inserted around 1000 items (one by one). It was much slower to insert via a ContentProvider. In my test almost 10% slower.

Upvotes: 3

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