Android Application Performance Improvement (using DDMS-Traceview/MAT tool): Part-1

The Application Performance improvement process is one of the real challenges in the mobile application development. Android provides various tools to analyze the performance of the application, like-DDMS, Traceview, Allocation Tracker. The memory analysis can be done through Eclipse Memory Analysis Tool which a very powerful tool. It provides various analysis, like-Histogram, Dominator Tree, Leak Suspects along with chart analysis.

This post covers the time analysis of an application, i.e. Stock Watch Application (which is one of my in-house developments) for an example, by using Traceview tool and the improvements observed in the application performance on post-optimization.

Traceview

Traceview is a graphical viewer for execution logs that you creates by using the Debug class to log tracing information in your code. Traceview can help you debug your application and profile its performance. It displays the log files data in two panels:

• A timeline panel -- describes when each thread and method started and stopped
• A profile panel -- provides a summary of what happened inside a method

Traceview Analysis on Pre-optimisation

Traceview helps us to find out the time spent in each method so that we could track the performance of each method we have written in the application.

1.       Start with Traceview profiling: Open Eclipse->DDMS->Devices(Tab), select the process of your application in the all the processes running on emulator/device. Now press ‘Start Method Profiling’ button as shown in below image.

2.       Application Navigation: Navigate to the application parts for which you want to create the profiling

3.       Stop Profiling: From the Devices Tab, select ‘Stop Method Profiling’ button as shown in below image. A profiling report will get generate automatically where you can start analysis.

As shown in the below image of Traceview report, the navigation time of these two activities is 51000 milliseconds*. The control was in the main Asynchronous thread for a large amount of time.

*since it is tested at android emulator; on device we might found the time difference.

Traceview Analysis on Post-optimisation

After optimizing the code, the navigation time has been reduced from 51000 milliseconds to 42000 milliseconds.

Performance Improvements

Improving application performance in terms of time and memory is one of the real challenges in mobile development. The android native tools like-DDMS/Traceview plays a significant role in improving the performance. Also these performance tests can be executed during the development life cycle.

Following are the performance improvements by using both the tools:

v  Using Traceview:

·         Navigation time reduced by 18%

·         Time spent by program control in Asyn Thread is lessened.

Hope now you can take advantage of Traceview tool to improve the performance of your application.

Note: The later parts of this post will cover the other tools analysis to improve android app performance. Keep an eye!! J