I'm developing an App with lot's of custom views and ran into performance issues with a quite complex one of them. The time they take for measuring and drawing is to high (>= 30ms typical). To give some more details: It's a custom ViewGroup (extending RelativeLayout) with custom Views (extending RelativeLayout although) as it's children.
So I'm it came across my mind what might be the better/quicker approach for getting rid of this performance problems: Optimize the children and layouts or switch to a completely custom drawn view (lines, rectangles and stuff like these)?
Do any of you have experience in one or another? Or even some done some benchmarks and is willing to share them?
The simple approach would be to work on simplifying and flattening the current view hierarchy and maybe you'll be able to make the measuring and drawing process much cheaper(or decent at least). You didn't posted a layout so there isn't something specific to say, I've seen you mentioned RelativeLayouts in RelativeLayouts, maybe you could remove one and move the views up one level(even with the expense of adding other helper views), every level counts(especially with nesting RelativeLayouts). You probably know already but the merge and include tags in layouts could prove quite useful.
RelativeLayout being in the standard SDK was built as a general widget so it most likely can't achieve the performance of a custom designed layout. It would make much more sense to make your current layouts extending RelativeLayout to extend ViewGroup and implement the measuring and layout of children manually especially as you probably know the use case scenarios in your apps(for example a RelativeLayout always needs to handle all the size constraint cases it could be in, your custom layout on the other hand could handle this much faster if you know that the custom view will have a certain size).
Related to a completely custom drawn view, it's an option but it depends on the complexity of your layout.
Or even some done some benchmarks and is willing to share them?
I don't see how various view benchmarks(which most likely will not apply to your specific situation) will help.