I’m having some performance problems with my game across some phones. I develop on Nexus One but played my game on a buddy’s Galaxy S and the performance was surprisingly much worse than I get.
I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s related to me writing to PlayerPrefs quite frequently instead of storing values locally and writing them when the game is finished.
I’ve read a couple threads that said they are cached on iOS. I’m wondering if that could be different on Android?
Back on Unity 3.2 when I was trying to track down a problem I profiled our game with traceview. Traceview doesn’t show much as it is really a java profiler. However you could see the PlayerPrefs calls going straight out to the java layer, there was no caching done on read or write.
I imagine you’d have to do a LOT of calls before it became a noticeable problem though.
Based on that feedback I wrote a CachedPlayerPrefs to do a quick find/replace of all my PlayerPref Set and Gets. The hitching seems to have disappeared.
Probably not something too many people will run into as I knew I was being lazy as I did it.
Hope this helps someone, but don’t ever write to PlayerPrefs during gameplay on Android (iOS seems fine), but probably something you should avoid in any situation.
Hi Josh,
We had similar problems with PlayerPrefs on Android (and even on iOS with a huge number of key/value pairs), so we wrote our own implementation. I shared it on our blog, so you can download it for free (it’s public domain).
With our implementation, you can easily save hundreds of PlayerPrefs key/values in a split second. You’ll only have to add two lines of code to make it work if you’re already using the built-in PlayerPrefs class.
This is the blog post I’m talking about: