Dalvik and ART have different behaviors than traditional Java VMs. Dalvik is aimed at low memory devices, ART trades some memory for speed but still is signific

Dalvik and ART have different behaviors than traditional Java VMs. Dalvik is aimed at low memory devices, ART trades some memory for speed but still is significantly different(i.e. it doesn't do escape analysis). As always benchmarking on hardware is the way to confirm this but I've had numerous cases where free lists or pre-allocated arrays has gained 10-30x performance improvements. Flatbuffers in particular excels here since once you have the ByteBuffer in memory you can immediately start accessing data without needing to do any extensive parsing. Even the official Android docs are very explicit[1] on the allocation point. Allocations are not cheap and even with generational collection you still will blow the 16.6ms frame window for 60 FPS if any of your operations allocate excessively. [1] https://developer.android.com/training/custom-views/optimizing-view#less https://developer.android.com/training/custom-views/optimizi...