The Android SDK includes a tool called zipalign that optimizes the way an application is packaged. Running zipalign against your application enables Android to interact it more efficiently at run time and thus has the potential to make it and the overall system run faster. We strongly encourage you to use zipalign on both new and already published applications and to make the optimized version available — even if your application targets a previous version of Android. This article describes how zipalign helps performance and how to use it to optimize your app.
Zipalign工具用于优化Android打包的应用.zipalign作用于你的应用可以使Android应用更有效率.强烈推荐使用zipalign优化所有的Android应用.本文讨论zipalign如何提升应用性能.
In Android, data files stored in each application's apk are accessed by multiple processes: the installer reads the manifest to handle the permissions associated with that application; the Home application reads resources to get the application's name and icon; the system server reads resources for a variety of reasons (e.g. to display that application's notifications); and last but not least, the resource files are obviously used by the application itself.
Android中存储在应用中的数据文件可以被多种应用访问: 比如安装器读取manifest来处理应用相关的权限; Home应用可获取应用的名称和图标; 系统服务器也会读取资源(如，用于显示应用提示); 当然这些资源也会被自身应用使用.
The resource-handling code in Android can efficiently access resources when they're aligned on 4-byte boundaries by memory-mapping them. But for resources that are not aligned (that is, when zipalign hasn't been run on an apk), it has to fall back to explicitly reading them — which is slower and consumes additional memory.
当资源通过内存映射以4字节边界对齐后，处理资源的代码可以更加有效地访问到资源.但是对于那些没对齐的资源(即使用zipalign优化的应用),相对来说效率会低一些.
For an application developer, this fallback mechanism is very convenient. It provides a lot of flexibility by allowing for several different development methods, including those that don't include aligning resources as part of their normal flow.
对于应用开发者而言,这种落后机制(即未aligned的应用)是很方便的.
Unfortunately, for users the situation is reversed — reading resources from unaligned apks is slow and takes a lot of memory. In the best case, the only visible result is that both the Home application and the unaligned application launch slower than they otherwise should. In the worst case, installing several applications with unaligned resources increases memory pressure, thus causing the system to thrash around by having to constantly start and kill processes. The user ends up with a slow device with a poor battery life.
不幸的是，对于用户来说正好相反 —— 读取unaligned的应用会很慢并且会占用很多内存. 这可能导玩致Home应用和unalignedy应用运行缓慢,甚至安装好几个unaligned的应用会占用大量内存导致系统内存不足自动清理掉其它进 程.这会降低将电池周期.
Luckily, it's very easy for you to align the resources in your application:
消除以下问题的方案是easy的:
1).Using ADT: —— 使用ADT工具自动完成以上操作
The ADT plugin for Eclipse (starting from version 0.9.3) will automatically align release application packages if the export wizard is used to create them. To use the wizard, right click the project and choose "Android Tools" > "Export Signed Application Package..." It can also be accessed from the first page of the AndroidManifest.xml editor.
2).Using Ant: —— 使用Ant(没用过,不清楚)
The Ant build script (starting from Android 1.6) can align application packages. Targets for older versions of the Android platform are not aligned by the Ant build script and need to be manually aligned.
Starting from the Android 1.6 SDK, Ant aligns and signs packages automatically, when building in debug mode.
In release mode, Ant aligns packages only if it has enough information to sign the packages, since aligning has to happen after signing. In order to be able to sign packages, and therefore to align them, Ant needs to know the location of the keystore and the name of the key in ant.properties. The name of the properties are key.store and key.alias respectively. If those properties are present, the signing tool will prompt to enter the store/key passwords during the build, and the script will sign and then align the apk file. If the properties are missing, the release package will not be signed, and therefore will not get aligned either.
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3).Manually: —— 手动完成align操作,使用以下命令完成aligned操作
In order to manually align a package, zipalign is in the tools/ folder of Android 1.6 and later SDKs. You can use it to align application packages targeting any version of Android. You should run it only after signing the apk file, using the following command:
zipalign -v 4 source.apk destination.apk
4).Verifying alignment: —— 验证alignment
The following command verifies that a package is aligned:
zipalign -c -v 4 application.apk
We encourage you manually run zipalign on your currently published applications and to make the newly aligned versions available to users. Also, don't forget to align any new applications going forward!
推荐通过手动方式来运行zipalign.