RecyclerView ANR during fast fling

I have a RecyclerView (1.2.1), with a List adapter, and ViewHolder, backed by a Room PagingSource. There's about 700 items on the list. The paging seems to work fine, and I've flattened my View hierarchy as much as I can.

Upon initially loading the recycler view, everything seems fine. Paging works, everything seems snappy. onCreateViewHolder in my adapter is called 14 times, and initially 5 are visible on the screen.

Slower scrolling is fine (it does call onCreateViewHolder more often than I expected, but there's no jank).

The problem comes when rapidly flinging through the list. After 3-5 fast flings, it appears to decide that it needs to have more cached view holders, and makes many, many calls to onCreateViewHolder - this method is clocking in at ~5ms, but there's just too many of them, and the scrolling stops. It appears to call onCreateViewHolder ~700 times - the same as the number of items on the list, like it's not recycling the views at all.

At that point, sometimes the app will recover, and at that point everything is smooth and it doesn't appear to need to create more ViewHolders. Sometimes however I will get the ANR dialog.

I've tried tweaking the recyclerView.recycledViewPool.setMaxRecycledViews(), but this doesn't appear to to increase the recycledViewCount until after the mass onCreateViewHolder calls.

Is there anything I can do to resolve this? Make the fling speed slower? Tune the view holder recycling somehow so that it doesn't go nuts and try and create so many at once?

I don't think I can get the layout inflation any better, given my design and data constraints. And even if I could, it's still creating waaay too many to be able to get them done in under 16ms!

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