A whole layer performance analysis method for Android platforms

Abstract

As the products based on Android platform have been widely spread in consumer electronics market, the needs for systematic performance analysis have significantly increased. Conventional approaches rely on publicly open performance analysis tools in Android SDK or Linux community such as DDMS (Dalvik Debug Monitor Server), LTTng, Oprofile, and Ftrace. Though the approaches provide analysis or measurement results in certain aspects and specific software layers, any methods do not give a whole software layer view in performance analysis. For example, once a method in an Android application turned out to be a performance bottleneck, it is very hard to locate the code fragments that actually caused the bottleneck in the whole software layers: the application codes do not provide direct reason for the bottleneck, but the underlying native layers including kernel events often cause the bottleneck.