Inspect CPU activity with CPU Profiler

Optimizing your app’s CPU usage has many advantages, such as providing a faster and smoother user experience and preserving device battery life.

You can use the CPU Profiler to inspect your app’s CPU usage and thread activity in real time while interacting with your app, or you can inspect the details in recorded method traces, function traces, and system traces.

The detailed information that the CPU Profiler records and shows is determined by which recording configuration you choose:

  • System Trace: Captures fine-grained details that allow you to inspect how your app interacts with system resources.
  • Method and function traces: For each thread in your app process, you can find out which methods (Java) or functions (C/C++) are executed over a period of time, and the CPU resources each method or function consumes during its execution. You can also use method and function traces to identify callers and callees. A caller is a method or function that invokes another method or function, and a callee is one that is invoked by another method or function. You can use this information to determine which methods or functions are responsible for invoking particular resource-heavy tasks too often and optimize your app’s code to avoid unnecessary work.

    When recording method traces, you can choose sampled or instrumented recording. When recording function traces, you can only use sampled recording.

For details of using and choosing each of these trace options, see Choose a recording configuration.

CPU Profiler overview

To open the CPU Profiler, follow these steps:

  1. Select View > Tool Windows > Profiler or click Profile in the toolbar.

    If prompted by the Select Deployment Target dialog, choose the device to which to deploy your app for profiling. If you've connected a device over USB but don't see it listed, ensure that you have enabled USB debugging.

  2. Click anywhere in the CPU timeline to open the CPU Profiler.

When you open the CPU Profiler, it immediately starts displaying your app’s CPU usage and thread activity. You should see something similar to Figure 1.

Figure 1. Timelines in the CPU Profiler.

As indicated in Figure 1, the default view for the CPU Profiler includes the following timelines:

  1. Event timeline: Shows the activities in your app as they transition through different states in their lifecycle, and indicates user interactions with the device, including screen rotation events. For information on enabling the event timeline on devices running Android 7.1 (API level 25) and lower, see Enable advanced profiling.
  2. CPU timeline: Shows real-time CPU usage of your app—as a percentage of total available CPU time—and the total number of threads your app is using. The timeline also shows the CPU usage of other processes (such as system processes or other apps), so you can compare it to your app’s usage. You can inspect historical CPU usage data by moving your mouse along the horizontal axis of the timeline.
  3. Thread activity timeline: Lists each thread that belongs to your app process and indicates its activity along a timeline using the colors listed below. After you record a trace, you can select a thread from this timeline to inspect its data in the trace pane.
    • Green: The thread is active or is ready to use the CPU. That is, it's in a running or runnable state.
    • Yellow: The thread is active, but it’s waiting on an I/O operation (for example, disk or network I/O) before it can complete its work.
    • Gray: The thread is sleeping and is not consuming any CPU time. This sometimes occurs when the thread requires access to a resource that is not yet available. Either the thread goes into voluntary sleep, or the kernel puts the thread to sleep until the required resource becomes available.

    The CPU Profiler also reports CPU usage of threads that Android Studio and the Android platform add to your app process—such as JDWP, Profile Saver, Studio:VMStats, Studio:Perfa, and Studio:Heartbeat (although, the exact names displayed in the thread activity timeline may vary). Android Studio reports this data so that you can identify when thread activity and CPU usage are actually caused by your app’s code.