Optimizing Retrofit calls in an Android app to reduce latency with large datasets
I'm getting frustrated with I'm confused about I'm working on a personal project and I'm working on a personal project and Currently developing an Android application that consumes a RESTful API using Retrofit....... The API endpoints return datasets that can be quite large, often exceeding 5 MB. While my initial implementation works, I’ve noticed significant latency when fetching this data, especially on older devices. It seems the app hangs for a moment, which negatively impacts user experience. To mitigate this, I've tried implementing pagination, but I still want to enhance the performance further. Here’s a snippet of the Retrofit interface: ```kotlin interface ApiService { @GET("data") suspend fun getData(@Query("page") page: Int, @Query("limit") limit: Int): Response<DataResponse> } ``` I have also experimented with `OkHttp` interceptors to cache responses, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference in the loading time. Here’s the interceptor I set up: ```kotlin class CacheInterceptor : Interceptor { override fun intercept(chain: Interceptor.Chain): Response { val response = chain.proceed(chain.request()) val cacheControl = CacheControl.Builder() .maxAge(5, TimeUnit.MINUTES) .build() return response.newBuilder() .header("Cache-Control", cacheControl.toString()) .build() } } ``` I also ran into a few `NetworkOnMainThreadException` errors while testing, which forced me to ensure all calls are done in coroutines. My current approach looks like this: ```kotlin private fun fetchData() { lifecycleScope.launch { try { val response = apiService.getData(currentPage, itemsPerPage) if (response.isSuccessful) { // Update UI } else { // Handle error } } catch (e: Exception) { Log.e("FetchData", "Error fetching data", e) } } } ``` Despite these efforts, there’s still a noticeable delay in the UI as data is being loaded. I’m curious if there are other strategies, perhaps involving data transformation or using a different networking library altogether, to enhance performance. Any advice on best practices or patterns to implement for optimizing Retrofit calls under these conditions would be greatly appreciated! I'd really appreciate any guidance on this. Any ideas what could be causing this? My development environment is Ubuntu 22.04. What am I doing wrong? What are your experiences with this?