Very long load time with many homescreen icons

[mugendai]

For every icon on an adw desktop(this issue seems to affect all launchers) adw takes just a little longer to load.

I normally have 5 screens, each screen at least half full of application shortcuts. I also keep only 1 widget running, which is the power settings widget.

I have done a lot of testing, and found it is most certainly the icons that cause the issue.

With this many icons, ADW takes as long as 10 seconds to show any icons, when it loads. This makes my phone an incredible pain to use unless I enable the option to keep ADW in memory.

From what I understand, it is not considered proper to force the launcher to stay in memory. Instead, android should be free to dump it from memory, and restore it from memory as needed.

However, ADW(and all other launchers) don't seem to be properly designed for this, as they seem to re-load all of the icons from the apk files everytime they are brought back in to memory.

It is my theory that if ADW were to create an icon cache, and load those icons from a cache when loading ADW, instead of loading them all from the apk's that ADW would be able to load almost instantly.

As a proof of concept workaround, I removed all of my icons from all of my screens. I then got FolderOrganizer and added a widget to every screen, and setup a different folder for each screen. I now represent the same layout, showing even more icons that I used to by using FolderOrganizer. It seems Folder Organizer caches the icons. It takes about 1 second for my icons to show now, when ADW loads. That is a dramatic difference. And I theorize the 1 seconds is spent loading 5 nearly fullscreen FolderOrganizer widgets, and 1 small facebook widget.

I believe implementing an icon cache for the homescreen icons would be 1 of 2 things that need to be done to make ADW the launcher that solves the terrible lag issue that many users experience. (Implement these two things, and users will no longer be asking for the option to keep home in memory)

The other thing, I will put in another Issue, as it is a similar but different issue.

Testing done on a Motorola Droid 1. Using a range of OS's. Currently running CM6 Nightly.