working with images in windows phone app - performance - windows-phone-7

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

Related

Workbox and responsive images

I don't fully understand how responsive images work. so if it doesn't work like I think it does then you can go on and ignore this question. If not here goes.
To ask this question let me paint a picture where a developer uses the workbox precache to cache a series of images in the service worker and since the developer wants to make his webapp responsive. He has to make sure that every image comes in different sizes some large, some medium and others small and all these images he would have to cache since its easy(You just use the glob pattern). but here is the problem. Lets say a user using a smartphone would visit the app and end up using only the medium sized image. so that means that the large image and the small one are useless to that user and he just wasted some important bandwidths caching them. And this would apply to all the other images in the app that are responsive. So the question is if there is a way(an that is a very big if) for workbox to use media queries to know the images to cache for the user based on the user's device. Maybe delay the installation of the service worker for a few milliseconds in order to verify at what dimension the user's device displays the images and so caches those images which the user will use and then discard the rest.

Website loads image with 1-2 second delay. Could I increase the performance somehow?

recently I made a website for my photography. htttp://www.simotamas.com
I am a newbie, so its not the best site but it works fine for me, I got only one problem, when a site is loaded on a device for the first time, the gallery loading time takes up to 1-2 seconds.
Could you guys please check if I mess up something with the code?
Or should I made the pictures even smaller?
Any way I could increase the loading performance.
I would be really thankful for any advice.
Some points you can consider
Use thumbnails for preview (low resolution) , while clicking load actual image.
Load images of only visible part first then load the images in bottom. (May affect user experience)
if you have cpu power , use any libraries like cache tools or compression tools like
https://nielse63.github.io/php-image-cache/ . benchmark it carefully.
use gzip if you are not using gzip compression for your server.
The fact your website doesn't wait for the image to load is considered a plus (look into asynchronous web page content loading for a good read) that said you should compress your images before uploading them.. tinypng.com is a nice tool for it... But if it's a photography website doing so would reduce picture quality... Try to play with Photoshop save settings to find your ideal compromise between quality and size with respect to "memory" size... Pictures are heavy.. high definition and resolution will obviously result in heavier files to download
Update: another thing you could do is actually display (smaller) thumbnail and only load the full picture on request. I.e: user clicks and image opens in new tab
It would help if you create smaller thumb versions of your images so the browser can initially load these ones for the overview and no need for scaling way to big images down while rendering the page. An image should always be downloaded in the dimension it's going to be presented.

Best practis for handling bitmaps in android with mono droid / xamarin.android

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.

Best way to deal with image thumbnails on news web site (custom CMS based on codeigniter)?

I’ve been thinking a while about the best solution and as much as I read I get more and more confused. There are a lot of different libraries and helpers (most of them are outdated or for CI 1.x) and I really need your help.
I have a custom CMS based on CodeIgniter 2.1.3, news site that has about 40-50 images on the home page, but 80% of them are really small thumbnails in 3 different sizes and the other 20% of the images on the home page are in 2 sizes + for the inner pages when I list the news from a category there is 1 size of thumbnails. So in total I will need the original image for the news story, + 5-6 thumbnails sizes for the home page.
What’s the smartest way to deal with this? There will be let’s say 10-50 new news per day.
Is it still better to create 5-6 thumbnails per image during the upload?
What about the method “on the fly”? I’m more into this method, as I read, only the first visitor will call the library/helper to generate the thumbnails, and for the others the thumbnails will be already created so it won’t waste CPU. What about this method? Is it good practice?
What caching techniques I should use for these what I need?
Also I forgot to ask, how the other CMS system deal with generating the thumbnails? I mean about Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.
Do they store predefined sizes or generate them on the fly?
I guess their logic should be the best, or maybe not, but I want to implement something smart in my CodeIgniter CMS.
I didn’t mention, but I think it’s not important to this, I use Grocery CRUD for the admin panel.
Any help is appreciated.
Your best bet is to create images on the fly + use CDN like Amazon Cloudfront to cache the resized versions of your source image.
I’ve been using CodeIgniter for a number of years to build websites where lots of different sizes of images are used throughout the website. At the beginning I used to create every size needed out of the original image during the upload process (could easily end up with more than 5 thumbnails). This proved to be delivering the best performance – whenever you need an image of the certain size you just include it with no additional PHP processing. However I noticed that I end up with a huge number of images on the server, where the older ones may not even be used that often (e.g.: articles older than a year). Plus developing this way takes longer.
Then I started creating images on the fly, firstly using 3rd party libraries and later developed my own interface for CodeIgniter. This saves a lot of time, because during the upload process you save an original version of the image not worrying about resized versions. When displaying an image in the front end, all you normally need to do is to pass certain dimensions of the image required. Doing this way, not only you can get 5-6 versions of the image, but as many as you need. Also that’s a solution for the future when you redesign your website where the different sized images might be needed! What would you do when none of your 5 thumbnail options are no longer valid and you need different sizes?
You’re right, resizing an image on the fly can really be CPU consuming operation (especially when the large images are involved), therefore caching is a must. You can cache images right on your server or get CDN on top of that.
To keep the server tidy I normally run a cron job to delete on-the-fly images older than let's say a week. That saves space + doesn't cause harm - whenever image is needed to display, it'll just get recreated.
Check out timthumb, it's a script that resizes images on the fly and stores them in a cache. It's a simple as including an image tag with parameters in the URL.
ALso check this link which looks promising http://www.jenssegers.be/blog/31/Codeigniter-resizing-and-cropping-images-on-the-fly-continued
I love the way Drupal manage this. In Drupal 6 there was a module called imagecache (now is in core in Drupal 7, but functionality is very similar), which basically stores presets for images (image sizes, transformations, effects...) and when the visitor ask for an image the module generate different images based on presets and serve this images. This way you upload an image but have different images for different purposes.
The module has a really useful feature, if you want to change one preset, you can "flush" all the images related with that preset, so the visitors can see the changes.
Of course there are many other modules in Drupal related to imagecache or image styles, that add other effects like watermarks...
More information:
http://drupal.org/node/949222
http://drupal.org/node/163561

How to improve performance in image loading on web application?

I have a web application running on local host. The requirement is to load multiple rectangular jpg images (96 images, average 7k in size each) and show on home page when it runs. Images are showed in a grid of 8x12 rows/columns. I am loading image by setting the 'src' attribute of the 'img' in javascript. The url assigned to the 'src' attribute is same for all images but the image id is different. Images are loading but the main issue is that they are not loading very quickly and they are some what loading in a sequence means 1,2,3,4... and so on but some images are not loaded in sequence. I want to improve the performance of this page. I have tried the figure out the timings at different points like:
When call is originated form client (image src attribute is set)
When server is receiving call. (the page on server which serve individual image)
When server is about to return the image.
When on client side image is received/showed (image loaded event called in javascript)
It turned out after looking at the collected data that main time is lost between 1 and 2 above that is between the client side call is originated and server is receiving call for a particular image.
I have also tried setting parameters like maxWorkerThreads, minWorkerThreads, requestQueueLimit and maxconnection in machine.config but no significant improvement yet.
Can someone please help me in this situation as i am stuck here since many days and i am really short of time now. Desperately needs to improve the performance of these images loads.
Thanks in advance.
Since you stress the lack of time, I would advise you to try a jQuery plugin that loads images on demand. The gallery in which you load the pictures, does the user scroll in it? Or is it 1 big field?
If it's a gallery the user can scroll in, I'd strongly suggest you take a look at lazyload. What this plugin does, is it fetches the image only when it is needed. As long as it's not on the screen, it will not be loaded. For a brief example, have a look at this demo.
I hope this can help you out.

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