Writing Mobile Code Essential Software Engineering for Building Mobile Applications [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Performance and Multithreading

As a general rule, multiple threads will not make your mobile application run faster. Another rule of thumb is that managing parallel threads of execution will make your application code more complex and more difficult to understand, maintain, and debug. For these reasons, it is important to not become "thread happy" and continually invent new uses for threads when they are not absolutely required.

There are, however, very good reasons to use background threading in your mobile applications. The most compelling use of threads is to keep your mobile device application responsive to the user when long-duration or indeterminate-duration tasks need to occur. A long-duration task is usually something that requires significant calculation or algorithmic processing to be performed. An indeterminate-duration activity is anything that requires access to resources that are outside your immediate control. (For example, when accessing any information across a network, it is virtually impossible to predict the latencies that may occur.) For these kinds of activities, asynchronous execution is a great choice.