Android animation causing “Activity idle timeout for History Record” on start up

Question

I have been searching for an answer to this and while I can find others who have been seeing the same entries in the log cat none of the footprints seem to be similar to mine.

Basically I start an infinitely repeating animation as part of my activity start up. The screen is rendered properly, is responsive to all touch input but I get the following entries in my logcat:

08-17 16:03:25.910: WARN/ActivityManager(110): Launch timeout has expired, giving up wake lock: 08-17 16:03.25:972: WARN/ActivityManager(110). Activity idle timeout for HistoryRecord{4057ad58 com.companyname.dm/.ui.activities.home.HomeActivity}

I have read posts that state these entries are indeed just warnings to indicate the main thread looper has never become idle and not a problem if it is the intended mode of operation. However, besides that fact that it seems excessive that the small repeating animation (a scale/transform/alpha animation that repeats every 3 seconds) is filling the message queue, my main issue is that it is preventing the ability to create automated tests. We are trying to implement a test using robotium but the test will never start because of the idle timeout.

Not starting the animation will eliminate this problem, but is much more a workaround than a root cause solution. I am trying to understand if I am either not implementing my animations properly, if this is indeed just the expected behavior or if there is a way to ensure the connection the instrumentation/robotium will be established.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

Try starting your animation in a new thread, if you do too much stuff in the onCreate method you will block the UI-thread in Android, and it could possibly lead to an ANR (Application not responding) if you take longer than 5 seconds before returning. By starting your animation in a new thread the onCreate will return and the system will be happy.

new Thread(new Runnable() {
  public void run() {
    //start animation.
  }
}.start();

Answer 2

The code which is repainting to the screen need to be started in a different thread, else the main UI thread will never become idle, which is causing the problem.

You may have issues when interacting with the UI from another thread, for this you should look into AsyncTask which is actually what is used to compute/draw progress bars. The obscene number of warnings is most likely because the warnings are generated any time after X seconds, which is only limited by Android's checks.