traceview: Test the performance of an Android application

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1957135/how-to-test-the-performance-of-an-android-application

 

If you want to profile your application to find performance bottlenecks you can use the traceview tool. This gives you a graphical view of performance traces of your application.

To create a trace add the following to your code where you want to start tracing:

Debug.startMethodTracing("myapp");

 

and then put the following when you want to stop tracing:

Debug.stopMethodTracing();

This will create a trace file call myapp.trace in the root directory of the SD Card. As it is written to the SD Card:

    If you're using the emulator you'll need to add an SD card to your AVD.

    You'll need to give you app permission to write the SD card by adding the following to your Manifest:

   

 

Once the file has been created you'll need to copy it to your PC. You can do this using the adb command:

adb pull /sdcard/myapp.trace c:/my/dir/myapp.trace

Finally, start traceview giving it the full path to the trace file:

traceview c:/my/dir/myapp.trace

I did have some problems with traceview failing with OutOfMemory exceptions. I fixed this on Windows by changing the last line of traceview.bat from:

call java -Djava.ext.dirs=%javaextdirs% -Dcom.android.traceview.toolsdir= -jar %jarpath% %*

to:

call java -Xmx1g -Djava.ext.dirs=%javaextdirs% -Dcom.android.traceview.toolsdir= -jar %jarpath% %*

Adding the -Xmx1g option allows traceview to use more memory.