UIImage representations in virtual memory - ios

I have a number of calls to [UIImage imageNamed:] and I know the caching keeps the bitmaps allocated in virtual memory.
However I have a number of small images such as buttons and icons and the total data size is not anywhere near the virtual memory allocations in the ImageIO region.
How large do images become once fully mapped in virtual memory?
How are images placed in Interface builder referenced? Via file URL or cached in VM?

If the image is mapped as a bitmap. then its size will be width * height * size per pixel. So if you have a 10 * 10 image that is 24 bytes per pixel. then it'll be 240 bytes in memory.

Related

Large jpeg using more memory than smaller jpeg when loaded in a UIImageView. Why?

The login view in our app uses large background images. To try and save on memory/app size I resized and compressed these images, which reduced their filesize significantly (less than 1mb, down from several mb).
When monitoring my apps memory usage (XCode debugger) there is a clear spike when a modified image is displayed (around 30-40mb). I'd accepted this as normal and simply made sure to release the image asap to limit memory usage.
I've recently started replacing a couple of the images and wanted to preview the new ones before resizing/compressing them. I noticed that these images (one of which is 11mb on disk and 4640x3472 pixels) has no visible effect on app memory usage whatsoever, increasing 'Other Processes' instead (by around 20-30mb).
Can anyone explain what's happening here? I want to confirm it is advisable to continue resizing/compressing the images.
Note that I'm loading the images using UIImage(contentsOfFile:) and I resized/compressed the images using GIMP. The new images have been taken straight from Flickr and unmodified.
Cheers.
The in-memory size of the image (as a UIImage) is different to the compressed on-disk size (your JPEG)
The UIImage takes 4 bytes (RGBA) per pixel x height x with - so for a 4640 x 3472 image, you're looking at 64,440,320 bytes - quite different to the 11MB on disk

How to optimize the memory when displaying same image multiple times?

I have an instance of UIImage with an image with size of 200KB, then I create 5 instances of UIImageView that reference to same this UIImage.
I wonder how much memory allocated in this case - only 200KB (of one UIImage instance) or 1MB (for 5 cloned UIImage instances)? In the case of wasting memory occured, is there effective way to solve it?
A couple of thoughts:
UIImage is a reference type, so when you reference the same image five times, you generally will have one image object in memory. It depends a little upon how you do this. For example, if you use UIImage(data:) each time, or something like that, it's possible to instantiate a new object each time, but if you instantiate only one UIImage and then proceed to use if five times, then you won't see duplicative memory consumption taking place.
As an aside:
You say the image has a size of 200kb. Is that the size of the original asset, or have you figured out that this is how much memory it will take at run time?
The reason I ask is that JPG and PNG files are generally compressed, but when you use it in an image view, it will be uncompressed. The amount of memory that an image takes has little to do with the file size of the original asset, but rather corresponds to the dimensions (in pixels) of the image. So a random PNG that is 676 kb that is 2560 x 1440 pixels may actually require 14mb of memory (four bytes per pixel).
Note, this memory consumption corresponds to the dimension of the image in question, not the dimensions of the image view to which you added it. If you're concerned about memory usage and if the image dimensions exceed the size of the image view (times the device scale), then you might want to consider resizing the image.
In the future, you can answer these questions empirically using Instruments. For example, in the following timeline, at the green signpost, I loaded a UIImage with the 676kb asset with modest memory impact, I set the image view image to use this asset at the purple signpost with a significant memory impact as it uncompressed this 2560 x 1440 px image, and I loaded five more image views with the same image at the orange signpost with negligible further memory impact.

ios image size in memory doesn't match with what's on disk

I have a simple image view and i load a 99 kb file on to it. However, once the image view is rendered, and when i observe the memory consumption in the "debug navigator" (xcode) it's showing up as 12 MB. I mean, without the image being rendered, with just the view controller on screen and an empty image view, memory consumed is 2 MB. With the 99 kb image loaded the memory consumption jumps to 14 MB.
Why is this discrepancy and what am i missing here ? a 99KB image loaded onto memory is showing up as 12 MB from a consumption stand point.
Any thoughts would be much appreciated.
Image files store compressed image data. But UIImage in memory stores color information of every pixel. Therefore the UIImage can be much larger then the image file on disk.
Often UIImage memory usage can be counted like this.
pixelCount * 4 byte (red, green, blue, alpha)

How can I find out how much memory a UIImageView is using?

I'm making an app that uses a large amount of UIImageView's and I am wanting to find out the size of each of the UIImageViews's to try and take a look at the app's memory usage in more detail.
I have played around with Instruments and I can see the amount of memory being alloced by the app but I am wanting a more in depth look at what objects use what memory. For example something like:
UIImageViewOne 10Mb
UIImageViewTwo 8Mb
UIImageViewThree 9Mb
UIImageViewFour 3Mb
Is this possible with Instruments or is there an easier way to view this information?
If you want to determine the amount of memory that will be used by an image, you can look at the cgImage property (which returns a CGImageRef) and then supply that as the parameter to bytesPerRow and multiply that by the height of the image. So, would look like the following (in Objective-C implementation would use CGImageGetBytesPerRow and CGImageGetHeight):
guard let cgImage = image.cgImage else { return }
let bytes = cgImage.bytesPerRow * cgImage.height
This, calculates the size of the pixel buffer used by the image when it is uncompressed and used within the app. Frequently this total is equal to 4 times the width times the height (both measured in pixels). (This is one byte for each of the four channels, red, green, blue, and alpha.) This isn't all of the memory associated with the image, but it accounts for the vast majority of it.
When I ran the above code on my 2,880 × 1,800 pixel image, it reported that it took 20,736,000 bytes (i.e. 19.78 mb).
As you know, if you want to see this in instruments, you can use the allocations tool and then drag within a specific range in the graph and you'll see the objects allocated, but not released, within that time period:
You'll see that for that selected range, the largest allocation was 19.78 mb of a ImageIO_PNG_Data (or if you used a JPG, you'd see a ImageIO_jpeg_Data).
Unfortunately, tracking these ImageIO allocations back to our code is a little more complicated than with most memory allocations, because of the sleight of hand that iOS does during the uncompression. But you can see how this ImageIO allocation correlates to the calculated pixel buffer size.
(See revision history for rendition for earlier versions of Swift.)

Poor memory management performance for images on ios devices

I have the following issue:
I have a primary view object (that inherits from UIView) that displays a grid of 16 squares (each is a class I created that inherits from UIImageView), in a 4x4 layout.
Each of these 16 squares is 160x160, and contains an image (a different image for each square) that is no bigger than 30kb. The image, however, is 500x500 (because it is used elsewhere in the program, in its full size), so it gets resized in the "square" class to 160x160, by the setFrame method.
By looking at the memory management feature of Xcode when the app is running, I've noticed a few things:
each of these squares, when added to the primary view object, increase the memory usage of the app by 1MB. This doesn't happen at instantiation, but only when they are added by [self addSubview:square] at the primary view object.
if I use the same image for all the squares, the memory increase is
minimal. If I initialize the square objects without any images, then
the increase is basically zero.
the same app, when running in the simulator, uses 1/6 of the memory
it does on an actual device.
The whole point here is: why is each of the squares using up 1MB of memory when loading a 30kb image? Is there a way to reduce this? I've tried creating the images in a number of different ways: [UIImage imageNamed:img], [UIImage imageWithContentsFromFile:path], [UIImage imageWithData:imgData scale:scale], as well as not resizing the frame.
When you use a 500x500 image in a smaller UIImageView, it's still loading the larger image into memory. You can solve this by resizing the UIImage, itself (not just adjusting the frame of the UIImageView), making a 160x160 image, and use that image in your view. See this answer for some code to resize the image, which can then be invoked as follows:
UIImage *smallImage = [image scaleImageToSizeAspectFill:CGSizeMake(160, 160)];
You might even want to save the resized image, so you're not constantly encumbering yourself with the computational overhead of creating the smaller images every time, e.g.:
NSData *data = UIImagePNGRepresentation(smallImage);
[data writeToFile:path atomically:YES];
You can then load that PNG file corresponding to your small image in future invocations of the view.
In answer to your question why it takes up so much memory, it's because while the image is probably stored as a compressed JPG or PNG in persistent storage, I suspect in memory it's held as an uncompressed bitmap. There are many internal formats, but a common one is a 32-bit format with 8 bits each for red, green, blue, and alpha. Regardless of the specifics, you can quickly see how a 500 x 500 pixel representation, with 4 bytes per pixel could translate to a 1 mb of memory. But a 160 x 160 image should be roughly one tenth the size.

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