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Content Pooling

When a Primitive Component is being mounted, its content (View or Drawable) needs to be either initialized or reused from the recycling pool. If the pool is empty, a new instance will be created at that time, which might keep the UI thread too busy and drop one or more frames. To mitigate that, the Litho framework can pre-allocate a few instances and put them in the recycling pool to improve performance.

note

Content pooling is especially recommended for Primitive Components that inflate a complex View, which is time-consuming to create from scratch.

Configuring pools​

In order to configure content pools, the properties of the View/Drawable Allocator can also be customized.

The ViewAllocator and DrawableAllocator have properties that allow for configuring the pool behaviour:

  • canPreallocate - enables pre-allocation for this Primitive Component (disabled by default)
  • poolSize - defines the number of instances for the Litho framework to pre-allocate (default value is three); setting poolSize to 0 disables pooling of a given View/Drawable

Primitive Components with canPreallocate set to true will be pre-allocated by Litho framework automatically before the component is mounted.

tip

If creating new instances of the content is time-consuming but not very memory-consuming, it's recommended to keep the pool size high.

If there are memory concerns (especially for memory-consuming content), smaller pool sizes are recommended.

Pre-allocation example​

In order for mount content to be pre-allocated, at least the canPreallocate property should be set to true. Use poolSize to configure the amount of items in the pool, as shown in the example below:

ViewAllocator(canPreallocate = true, poolSize = 10) { context -> EditText(context) }

For the SampleTextInput component example above, ten instances of EditText will be created and pre-allocated in the recycling pool.

Pre-filling content pool​

If automatic pre-allocation isn't enough, Litho provides an API that allows for manually pre-filling content pool ahead of time. For example, it may be useful when there is a complex component that needs to be displayed on the next screen. Pre-filling such component before the user opens the next screen may improve performance. In order to manually pre-fill content pool, you should use MountContentPools.prefillMountContentPool method, as shown in the example below:

// preallocate 40 TestTextViewPrimitiveComponent components
MountContentPools.prefillMountContentPool(androidContext, 40, TestTextViewPrimitiveComponent.ALLOCATOR)

The last parameter of prefillMountContentPool is the ContentAllocator, which for convenience, can be stored inside of PrimitiveComponent's companion object:

class TestTextViewPrimitiveComponent(val style: Style? = null) : PrimitiveComponent() {
  override fun PrimitiveComponentScope.render(): LithoPrimitive {
    return LithoPrimitive(
        layoutBehavior = FixedSizeLayoutBehavior(100.px, 100.px),
        mountBehavior = MountBehavior(ALLOCATOR) {},
        style = style)
  }

  companion object {
    val ALLOCATOR = ViewAllocator(poolSize = 10) { context -> TextView(context) }
  }
}
Important

In order for content pre-filling to work properly, it's important to pass the same instance of an Allocator to the Primitive's MountBehavior and to prefillMountContentPool method.