I am displaying images from the internet in a vertical ListView. I fetch the images using http.get (not using cached network image cuz I do not want to cache the images). Then I insert the image Uint8List into image.memory(). What happens is that as the user scrolls the list and images are loading, the ram keeps increasing until the whole app crashes. Any ideas what to do ?
Yeah, this is the normal behavior. I don't know why exactly. My theory is that the images by default are disposed if the dart objects holding references to them are garbage collected rather then when the widgets are knocked off the widgets tree, but don't take my word for it- that's just my personal reasoning. It may be completely wrong.
To get around this, I use Extended Image pakcage It's constructors take a bool clearMemoryCacheWhenDispose which disposes of images in RAM in scroll lists. You may do that or visit the package code to see how he's doing it, and replicate it.
Other advice I can give is to make sure your images are of the appropriate size. If you are loading your images locally check this part of the documentation to have different dimensions selected for different screen sizes https://flutter.dev/docs/development/ui/assets-and-images#loading-images
If you are fetching your images from network which is more likely, make sure their sizes are appropriate, and have different sizes served if you can. If you don't have control over that set cacheWidth and cacheHeight in Image.memory these will reduce the cached image in memory (RAM). You see by default Flutter caches images in full resolution despite their apparent size in the device/app. For example if you want your image to display in 200x200 box then set cacheWidth to 200 * window.devicePixelRatio.ceil() you will find window in dart:ui, and if you only set cacheWidth, the ratio of your images will remain true. Same true if you only set cacheHeight. Also do use ListView.builder as suggested.
I am disappointed at how little is said about this in Flutter docs. Most of the time people discover this problem when their apps start crashing. Do check your dev tools regularly for memory consumption. It's the best indicator out there.
Cheers and good luck
I was having the same issue and found a fix thanks to #moneer!
Context:
Users in my app can create shared image galleries which can easily contain several hundred images. Those are all displayed in a SliverGrid widget. When users scrolled down the list, too many images were loaded into RAM and the app would crash.
Things I had already implemented:
Image resizing on the server side and getting the appropriate sized images on the client based on the device pixel ratio and the tile size in the gallery
I made sure that my image widgets were properly disposing when out of view, but the memory size kept building up as the user scrolled through all the images anyway
Implement cacheHeight to limit the size of the cached image to the exact size of the displayed image
All these things helped but the app would eventually still crash every time the user scrolled down far enough.
The fix:
After some googling I stumbled upon this thread and tried the extended_image_package as #moneer suggested. Setting the clearMemoryCacheWhenDispose flag to true fixed the issue of the app crashing as it was now properly clearing the images from memory when they were out of view. Hooray! However, in my app users can tap on an image and the app navigates to an image detail page with a nice Hero animation. When navigating back the image would rebuild and this would cause a rebuild 'flicker'. Not that nice to look at and kind of distracting.
I then noticed that there's also an enableMemoryCache flag. I tried setting this to false and that seems to work nicely for me. The Network tab in Dart DevTools seems to show that all images are only fetched from the network once when scrolling up and down the gallery multiple times. The app does not crash anymore.
I'll have to more testing to see if this leads to any performance issues (if you can think of any please let me know).
The final code:
ExtendedImage.network(
_imageUrl,
cacheHeight: _tileDimension,
fit: BoxFit.cover,
cache: true, // store in cache
enableMemoryCache: false, // do not store in memory
enableLoadState: false, // hide spinner
)
I had a similar issue when I loaded images from files in a ListView.
[left-side: old code, right-side: new code]
The first huge improvement for me: not to load the whole list at once
ListView(children:[...]) ---> ListView.builder(...).
The second improvement was that images are no longer loaded at full-size:
Image.file("/path") ---> Image.file("/path", cacheWidth: X, cacheHeight: Y)
These two things solved my memory problems completely
Ideally caching happens kind of by default after some conditions are fulfilled. So its upon your app to be responsible to handle and control how the caching will happen.
Checkout this answer
https://stackoverflow.com/a/24476099/12264865
I am having some memory issues with our android app when handling bitmaps (duh!).
We are having multiple activities loading images from a server, this could be a background image for the activity.
This background image could be the same for multiple activities, and right now each activity is loading its own background image.
This means if the flow is ac1->ac2->ac3->ac4 the same image will be loaded 4 times and using 4x memory.
How do I optimize imagehandling for this scenario? Do I create an image cache where the image is stored and then each activity ask the cache first for images. If this is the case, how do I know when to garbage collect the image from the cache?
Any suggestions, link to good tutorials or similar is highly appreciated.
Regards
EDIT:
When downloading images for the device the exact sizes is used, meaning that if the ui element needs an 100x100 pixel image it gets that size and therefore no need for scaling. So i am not sure about downscaling the image when loading it into the memory. Maybe it is needed to unload images in the activity when moving on the the next and then reload when going back.
One thing you might want to try is scaling down your bitmaps (make a thumbnail) to a size that is more appropriate to your device. It's pretty easy to quickly use up all the RAM on an Android device with a bitmap if you don't scale it down. This recipe shows how to do so on the fly. You could adapt this to save the images to disk.
You could also create your own implementation of the LRUCache to cache the images for your app.
After ready your update I will give you an other tip then.
I can still post the patch too if people want that..
What you need to do with those bitmaps is call them with a using block. That way Android will unload the bitmap as soon as that block is executed.
Example:
using(Bitmap usedBitmap = new Bitmap()){
//Do stuff with the Bitmap here
//You can call usedBitmap.Dispose() but it's not really needed
}
With this code your app shouldn't keep all the used bitmaps in memory.
I have an application where you can upload and view images.
For the view I need the images in different resolutions.
There are two ways how to proceed:
Scale the images dynamicly with assetics
Persist the image in different resolutions when uploaded
For me the 1. would be more comfortable but I am not sure if the performance is ok.
Does anyone have some experience about dynamic resizing with assetics?
Regards
I use Avalanche Imagine Bundle for this task. It allows you to configure filters, and then apply them in your templates.
As per your concern about performance - it's not generating the image for every request - only at first request, and it stores them in cache. You have to handle re-generating (i.e. deleting the cache) manually on entity level though (afaik)
I have an app that allows users to take pictures and store them in the IsolatedStorage. These images are then retrieved to display them in a list. The app suffers from performance issues when there are more than 30+ images in the list. It is taking a long time to retrieve these images from the storage and bind them to the list. A lot of times, the app is just closed by OS because it takes too long.
Also, I think as better resolution devices are coming in the market, the images are getting created with bigger sizes and affecting performance even more.
I need some guidance on how to resolve this. Couple of things I have though about:
1) how can I asynchronously retrieve every image to be retrieved from IS so the page can load but the images are being retrieved in async fashion. Any sample code is appreciated.
2) the other approach will be where I create a thumbnail photo of the actual photo (smaller size and resolution) while storing the original photo and use this thumbnail photo in binding to the list later. If this should be done, then how should I go about processing the image on the fly to create a smaller size thumbnail version of the original photo.
Any other ideas are appreciated as well.
Thanks for your time.
If you are able to, I would recommend using the Async CTP and making the code that loads images from isolated storage async. The methods that generate the thumbnails can be async as well.
If you cannot do this (add these dependencies to your project), use a BackgroundWorker. Perhaps this article can help you get started.
This will allow your UI to be responsive while processing continues on threads in the background.
Do not pretend the Isolated Storage as a SQL Server. There will be great performance difference. If you want to process too much data, send them to server.
However, there is a method for getting a thumbnail. You can use it:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.drawing.image.getthumbnailimage.aspx
Also, please check this answer:
Create thumbnail image
my company has recently started to get problems with the image handling for our websites.
We have several websites (adult entertainment) that display images like dvd covers, snapshots and similar. We have about 100'000 movies and for each movie we have an average of 30 snapshots + covers. Almost every image has an additional version with blurring and overlay for non-members, this results in about 50 images per movie or a total of 5 million base images. Each of the images is available in several versions, depending on where it's placed on the page (thumbnail, original, small preview, not-so-small preview, small image in the top-list, etc.) which results in more images than i cared to count.
Now i had the idea to use a server to generate the images on-the-fly since it became quite clumsy to generate all the different images for all the different pages (as different pages sometimes even need different image sizes for basically the same task).
Does anyone know of an image processing server that can scale down images on-the-fly so we only need to provide the original images and the web guys can just request whatever size they need?
Requirements:
Very High performance (Several thousand users per day)
On-the-fly blurring and overlay creation
On-the-fly resize (with and without keeping aspect ratio)
Can handle millions of images
Must be able to read JPG, GIF, PNG and BMP and convert between them
Security is not that much of a concern as i.e. the unblurred images can already be reached by URL manipulation and more security would be nice but it's not required and frankly i stopped caring (After failing to get into my coworkers heads why (for our small reseller page) it's a bad idea to use http://example.com/view_image.php?filename=/data/images/01020304.jpg to display the images).
We tried PHP scripts to do this but the performance was too slow for this many users.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions you have.
I suggest you set up a dedicated web server to handle image resize and serve the final result. I have done something similar, although on a much smaller scale. It basically eliminates the process of checking for the cache.
It works like this:
you request the image appending the required size to the filename like http://imageserver/someimage.150x120.jpg
if the image exists, it will be returned with no other processing (this is the main point, the cache check is implicit)
if the image does not exist, handle the 404 not found via .htaccess and reroute the request to the script that generates the image of the required size
in the script specify the list of allowed sizes to avoid attacks like scripts requesting every possible size to shut your server down
keep this on a cookieless domain to minimize unnecessary traffic
EDIT: I don't think that PHP itself would slow the process much, as PHP scripting in this case is reduced to a minimum: the image scaling is done by a builtin library written in C. Whatever you do you'll have to use a library like this (GD or libmagick or so) so that's unavoidable. With my system at least you totally skip the overhead of checking the cache, thus further reducing PHP interaction. You can implement this on your existing server, so I guess it's a solution well suited for your budget.
Based on
We tried PHP scripts to do this but the performance was too slow for this many users.
I'm going to assume you weren't caching the results. I'd recommend caching the resulting images for a day or two (i.e. have your script check to see if the thumbnail has already been generated, if so use it, if it hasn't generate it on the fly).
This would improve performance dramatically as I'd imagine the main/start page probably has a lot more hits than random video X, thus when viewing the main page no images have to be created as they're cached. When User Y views Movie X, they won't notice the delay as much since it just has to generate that one page.
For the "On-the-fly resize" aspect - how important is bandwidth to you? I'd want to assume you're going through so much with movies that a few extra kb in images per request wouldn't do too much harm. If that's the case, you could just use larger images and set the width and height and let the browser do the scaling for you.
The ImageCache and Image Exact Sizes solutions from the Drupal community might do this, and like most solutions OSS use the libraries from ImageMagik
There are some AMI images for Amazons EC2 service to do image scaling. It used Amazon S3 for image storage, original and scales, and could feed them through to Amazons CDN service (Cloud Front). Check on EC2 site for what's available
Another option is Google. Google docs now supports all file types, so you can load the images up to a Google docs folder, and share the folder for public access. The URL's are kind of long e.g.
http://lh6.ggpht.com/VMLEHAa3kSHEoRr7AchhQ6HEzHVTn1b7Mf-whpxmPlpdrRfPW216UhYdQy3pzIe4f8Q7PKXN79AD4eRqu1obC7I
Add the =s paramter to scale the image, cool! e.g. for 200 pixels wide
http://lh6.ggpht.com/VMLEHAa3kSHEoRr7AchhQ6HEzHVTn1b7Mf-whpxmPlpdrRfPW216UhYdQy3pzIe4f8Q7PKXN79AD4eRqu1obC7I=s200
Google only charge USD5/year for 20GB. There is a full API for uploading docs etc
Other answers on SO
How best to resize images off-server
Ok first problem is that resizing an image with any language takes a little processing time. So how do you support thousands of clients? We'll you cache it so you only have to generate the image once. The next time someone asks for that image, check to see if it has already been generated, if it has just return that. If you have multiple app servers then you'll want to cache to a central file-system to increase your cache-hit ratio and reduce the amount of space you will need.
In order to cache properly you need to use a predictable naming convention that takes into account all the different ways that you want your image displayed, i.e. use something like myimage_blurred_320x200.jpg to save a jpeg that has been blurred and resized to 300 width and 200 height, etc.
Another approach is to sit your image server behind a proxy server that way all the caching logic is done automatically for you and your images are served by a fast, native web server.
Your not going to be able to serve millions of resized images any other way. That's how Google and Bing maps do it, they pre-generate all the images they need for the world at different pre-set extents so they can provide adequate performance and be able to return pre-generated static images.
If php is too slow you should consider using the 2D graphic libraries from Java or .NET as they are very rich and can support all your requirements. To get a flavour of the Graphics API here is a method in .NET that will resize any image to the new width or height specified. If you omit a height or width, it will resize maintaining the right aspect ratio. Note Image can be a created from a JPG, GIF, PNG or BMP:
// Creates a re-sized image from the SourceFile provided that retails the same aspect ratio of the SourceImage.
// - If either the width or height dimensions is not provided then the resized image will use the
// proportion of the provided dimension to calculate the missing one.
// - If both the width and height are provided then the resized image will have the dimensions provided
// with the sides of the excess portions clipped from the center of the image.
public static Image ResizeImage(Image sourceImage, int? newWidth, int? newHeight)
{
bool doNotScale = newWidth == null || newHeight == null; ;
if (newWidth == null)
{
newWidth = (int)(sourceImage.Width * ((float)newHeight / sourceImage.Height));
}
else if (newHeight == null)
{
newHeight = (int)(sourceImage.Height * ((float)newWidth) / sourceImage.Width);
}
var targetImage = new Bitmap(newWidth.Value, newHeight.Value);
Rectangle srcRect;
var desRect = new Rectangle(0, 0, newWidth.Value, newHeight.Value);
if (doNotScale)
{
srcRect = new Rectangle(0, 0, sourceImage.Width, sourceImage.Height);
}
else
{
if (sourceImage.Height > sourceImage.Width)
{
// clip the height
int delta = sourceImage.Height - sourceImage.Width;
srcRect = new Rectangle(0, delta / 2, sourceImage.Width, sourceImage.Width);
}
else
{
// clip the width
int delta = sourceImage.Width - sourceImage.Height;
srcRect = new Rectangle(delta / 2, 0, sourceImage.Height, sourceImage.Height);
}
}
using (var g = Graphics.FromImage(targetImage))
{
g.SmoothingMode = SmoothingMode.HighQuality;
g.InterpolationMode = InterpolationMode.HighQualityBicubic;
g.DrawImage(sourceImage, desRect, srcRect, GraphicsUnit.Pixel);
}
return targetImage;
}
In the time that this question has been asked, a few companies have sprung up to deal with this exact issue. It is not an issue that's isolated to you or your company. Many companies reach the point where they need to look for a more permanent solution for their image processing needs.
Services like imgix serve as a proxy and CDN for image operations like resizing and applying overlays. By manipulating the URL, you can apply different transformations to each image. imgix serves billions of requests per day.
You can also stand up services on your own and put them behind a CDN. Open source projects like imageproxy are good for this. This puts the burden of maintenance on your operations team.
(Disclaimer: I work for imgix.)
What you are looking for is best matched by Thumbor http://thumbor.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html , which is open source, backed by a huge company (means it will not disappear tomorrow), and ships with a lot of nice features like detecting what is important on an image when cropping.
For low-cost plus CDN I'd suggest to combine it with Cloudfront and AWS storage, or a comparable solution with a free CDN like Cloudflare. These might not be the best performing CDN providers, but at least still perform better than one server and also offload your image server on the cheap. Plus, it will save you a TON of bandwidth cost.
If each different image is uniquely identifiable by a single URL then I'd simply use a CDN such as AKAMAI. Let your PHP script do the job and let AKAMAI handle the load.
Since this kind of business doesn't usually have budget problems, that'd be the only place I'd look at.
Edit: that works only if you do find a CDN that will serve this kind of content for you.
This exact same problem is now being solved by image resize services dedicated to this task. They provide following features:
In built CDN - you need not worry about image distribution
Image resize on the fly - any size needed is available
No storage needed - you just store base image and all variants are handled by service
Ecosystem libraries - you can just include javascript and your job is done for all devices and all browsers.
One such service is Gumlet. You can also try some open source alternative like nginx plugin which can also resize image on the fly.
(I work for Gumlet.)