How is the number of views limited?

I want to figure out the main effectivity issues of the Android layouts and views. I'm doing a research now but maybe somebody has answers already.

I have a RelativeLayout that is populated with views dynamically. Basically, the application loads a forum thread in XML and then renders the discussion tree so each message is displayed in its own group of views. I've decided not to use WebView because I want to implement some client-side functions that should be easier to do on custom views than on HTML page.

However this approach has a major flaw: it's heavy.

The first problem (which I've solved) was nesting of views. This is not an issue now, my layout is almost flat so the maximum depth is 10-12 (counting from the very top PhoneWindow$DecorView, the actual depth depends on data).

Now I've reached the next limit that is somehow connected to (or caused by) resource consumption of the views. After loading the data, the application hangs for a while to build the layout (creates the views and populates them with the data), and the hang time seems to grow linear with the data size; and if the data is large enough, the view will never appear (eventually the system suggests closing the application because it isn't responding).

Now the questions:

1. Does memory consumption depend significantly on the view class? In other words, is there any major difference between a Button and a TextView, or an ImageView? I can attach a click handler to any view so they don't differ much in usage.

2. Do background images affect the performance? If the same image is set in N views, will it make the layout N times heavier? (I understand that this question may look silly but anyway.)

3. Are nine-patch images