Background performance

Issue summary

Background performance issues occur when background tasks consume excessive resources or take too long to execute. This can negatively impact overall app responsiveness and degrade the user experience.

Platform target and tolerance:

• Target: 100 ms
• Tolerance: up to 400 ms

Why it matters

Inefficient background processing can drain device resources such as CPU and battery, slow down the app’s performance, and ultimately lead to frustrated users. Poorly optimized background tasks reduce app efficiency and can cause the app to lag or become unresponsive during user interactions.

How severity is calculated

The severity score is based on how much the duration or resource consumption of background tasks exceeds the target and tolerance thresholds.

Severity	Definition
No issue raised	Background task execution ≤ 100 ms. No significant issue.
Low–Medium	Task duration exceeds target but is within tolerance (100–400 ms). Moderate impact.
High–Critical	Task duration exceeds tolerance (> 400 ms). Indicates serious performance degradation.

How to fix a background performance issue

When Kotzilla detects a background performance problem, focus on analyzing and optimizing background tasks and their component initialization code to reduce resource consumption and execution time.

Key areas to focus on:

• Efficiently managing background services to avoid unnecessary resource use
• Scheduling background work thoughtfully to minimize impact
• Optimizing heavy or long-running dependencies in the background

Recommended actions

1. Koin scopes to manage background services
   Use Koin’s scoped dependencies to precisely manage the lifecycle of background services, ensuring they are active only when truly needed. For example, tie a background service’s lifecycle to an activity, fragment, or specific feature scope. This prevents services from running unnecessarily in the background and consuming resources when the user is not interacting with the related feature.

2. Schedule background work efficiently
   Use Android’s WorkManager or similar scheduling APIs to handle periodic, deferred, or guaranteed background tasks. Configure these tasks’ dependencies through Koin to maintain proper lifecycle management and reduce resource waste. This approach helps ensure that background work is executed efficiently, respects device constraints, and avoids redundant executions.

3. Analyze and optimize heavy background dependencies
   Identify which Koin-managed background dependencies are consuming the most resources or causing prolonged execution times. Optimize these components by adopting more efficient data processing methods, moving heavy computations to appropriate background threads or coroutine dispatchers, and refactoring complex or tightly coupled modules to reduce overhead.

Use the Kotzilla SDK API and Console to investigate

The Kotzilla Console’s Threads section provides visibility into background tasks managed by Koin, showing detailed performance insights. You can see which components and dependencies cause long executions or heavy resource use.

Using the Kotzilla SDK API, you can instrument your component initialization code to add custom logs, measure execution time, and capture contextual data for deeper analysis.

For full setup and usage details, see the Kotzilla SDK API documentation.

Need help?

Background tasks running slow or draining resources? Reach out to our experts anytime for guidance, best practices, and tips to optimize your app’s performance!