Stopping Launcher Pro from redrawing

If you have Launcher Pro, or any other home replacement running, sometimes you’ll notice it will restart itself (redraw icons) when you try to go back to your homescreen. This can be caused by the app running out of memory or something crashing in the background causing it to restart. Either way, it’s ok if it happens once in a while but if it’s every time you hit your home key, then it’s a problem.

I’ve tried just about every setting in Launcher Pro on my Droid. From setting the memory usage to high and checking and unchecking various settings to see if anything changes. Here’s what I’ve noticed that made an improvement.

  1. If you have more than one home launcher, remove the ones you do not use. I had ADW and the default Launcher2 loaded as well as Launcher Pro which I was using. I removed all of them except Launcher Pro.
  2. Set Launcher Pro option to keep it in memory and change memory usage to medium or high.
  3. I had SetCPU‘s widget on the main homescreen showing me my CPU speed. Upon removing it, the screens appeared quicker coming out of an app.
  4. If you are running CyanogenMod, change the option for VM heap to 32M.

With these changes, I’ve noticed about 60-70% less redraws. Your mileage will vary of course depending on how your Droid is set up.