The tenth article in the Perfetto series focuses on Binder, the core Inter-Process Communication (IPC) mechanism of Android. Binder carries almost all interactions between system services and applications and is a frequent source of performance bottlenecks. This article, written from a system development and performance tuning perspective, combines data sources like android.binder, sched, thread_state, and android.java_hprof to provide a practical diagnostic workflow that helps both beginners and advanced developers identify issues related to latency, thread pool pressure, and lock contention.
This is the ninth article in the Perfetto series, focusing on CPU information analysis in Perfetto. Perfetto provides far superior data visualization and analysis capabilities compared to Systrace. Understanding CPU-related information is the foundation for locating performance bottlenecks and analyzing power consumption issues.
The goal of this series is to examine the overall operation of the Android system from a brand new graphical perspective through the Perfetto tool, while also providing a new way to learn the Framework. Perhaps you’ve read many source code analysis articles but always feel confused by the complex call chains or can’t remember specific execution flows. Through Perfetto, by visualizing these processes, you may gain a deeper and more intuitive understanding of the system.
This is the eighth article in the Perfetto series, providing an in-depth introduction to the Vsync mechanism in Android and its representation in Perfetto. The article will analyze how the Android system performs frame rendering and composition based on Vsync signals from Perfetto’s perspective, covering core concepts such as Vsync, Vsync-app, Vsync-sf, and VsyncWorkDuration.
With the popularization of high refresh rate screens, understanding the Vsync mechanism has become increasingly important. This article uses 120Hz refresh rate as the main narrative thread to help developers understand the working principles of Vsync in modern Android devices, and how to observe and analyze Vsync-related performance issues in Perfetto.
Note: This article is based on Android 16’s latest architecture and implementation
This is the seventh article in the Perfetto series, focusing on MainThread (UI Thread) and RenderThread, the two most critical threads in any Android application. This article will examine the workflow of MainThread and RenderThread from Perfetto’s perspective, covering topics such as jank, software rendering, and frame drop calculations.
As Google officially promotes Perfetto as the replacement for Systrace, Perfetto has become the mainstream choice in performance analysis. This article combines specific Perfetto trace information to help readers understand the complete workflow of MainThread and RenderThread, enabling you to:
- Accurately identify key trace tags: Understand the roles of critical threads like UI Thread and RenderThread
- Understand the complete frame rendering process: Every step from Vsync signal to screen display
- Locate performance bottlenecks: Quickly find the root cause of jank and performance issues through trace information
This is the sixth article in the Android Perfetto series. It focuses on the 120Hz refresh rate, which has now become a standard for Android flagship devices. We will discuss the advantages and challenges of high refresh rates and analyze how 120Hz works from a system perspective.
Over the past few years, mobile display technology has evolved from 60Hz to 90Hz and now commonly to 120Hz. This evolution brings not only a smoother visual experience but also new requirements for system architecture and app development. Using Perfetto, we can gain a clearer understanding of frame rendering and performance on high-refresh-rate devices.
This article introduces Choreographer, a class that App developers may not frequently encounter but is critically important in the Android Framework rendering pipeline. We will cover the background of its introduction, a brief overview, partial source code analysis, its interaction with MessageQueue, its application in APM (Application Performance Monitoring), and some optimization ideas for Choreographer by mobile phone manufacturers.
The introduction of Choreographer is mainly to cooperate with Vsync to provide a stable Message processing timing for upper-layer application rendering. When the Vsync signal arrives, the system controls the timing of each frame’s drawing operation by adjusting the Vsync signal cycle. Currently, the screen refresh rate of mainstream mobile phones has reached 120Hz, which means refreshing once every 8.3ms. The system adjusts the Vsync cycle accordingly to match the screen refresh frequency. When each Vsync cycle arrives, the Vsync signal wakes up the Choreographer to execute the application’s drawing operation. This is the main purpose of introducing Choreographer. Understanding Choreographer can also help application developers deeply understand the operating principle of each frame, and at the same time deepen their understanding of core components such as Message, Handler, Looper, MessageQueue, Input, Animation, Measure, Layout, and Draw. Many APM (Application Performance Monitoring) tools also utilize the combination mechanisms of Choreographer (via FrameCallback + FrameInfo), MessageQueue (via IdleHandler), and Looper (via custom MessageLogging) for performance monitoring. After deeply understanding these mechanisms, developers can conduct performance optimization more specifically and form systematic optimization ideas.
This is the fourth article in the Perfetto series. It explains how to use trace_processor_shell to open large trace files (often exceeding 2GB). In practice, we frequently encounter massive traces that the browser-based ui.perfetto.dev cannot open due to browser memory constraints. To solve this, we use the official trace_processor_shell tool to power the analysis from your local machine.
This is the third article in the Android App ANR series, sharing several ANR case studies. The series includes:
This is the third article in the Android App ANR series, focusing on real-world ANR cases. The series includes:
This is the second article in the Android App ANR series, focusing on ANR analysis methodology and key logs. The series includes:
This is the second article in the Android App ANR series, focusing on ANR analysis methodology and key logs. The series includes:
This is the first article in the Android App ANR series, mainly analyzing the design philosophy of Android ANR from a system perspective. The series directory is as follows:
This is the third article in the Perfetto series. After introducing what Perfetto is and how to capture traces, this article focuses on how to navigate the web interface and interpret the complex information presented after opening a trace.
The previous article Android Perfetto Series 1: Introduction to Perfetto introduced what Perfetto is. This article will provide a brief guide on how to capture Perfetto traces.
This is the first article in the Perfetto series. It provides a brief introduction to the tool, including its history, development, and capabilities.
With Google announcing the deprecation of Systrace in favor of Perfetto, Perfetto has essentially replaced Systrace in my daily workflow. Major manufacturers like OPPO and vivo have also transitioned to Perfetto. Many developers new to Android performance optimization find Perfetto’s complex interface and features overwhelming, which is why I’ve decided to re-present my previous Systrace articles using Perfetto.
