Quote Originally Posted by WILL View Post
Our performance issues extend to any Android based platforms so even if you information is just about Android devices, it'll help. The only difference may be that OUYA is a quad-core.

Well our game is not using object pooling, and we have to put it in, but I'm wondering if that may be a bigger problem than we think. The game does create and destroy objects, but not consistently. How much of a performance hit can your game take while you are not creating or destroying objects without the object pooling implemented?

Are there other memory management issues such as Garbage Collection kicking in at other times for other reasons?
GC starting to do its work is a problem in game development on managed platforms, especially Android/Dalvik. When I've looked around most people advice not to create and free resources during gameplay. It is considered a slow process on Android and at some point the GC will begin and possibly make your game lag for a little while.

As SilverWarrior writes it's true that Object pooling is not the right answer in all cases, but for a real-time apps on an Android device I believe pooling is often worth doing.
Another advice regarding GC is to call it after initialization of a game and before and after gameplay to try and prevent the GC from starting during gameplay.