Benchmark your app

Benchmarking is a way to inspect and monitor the performance of your app. You can regularly run benchmarks to analyze and debug performance problems and help ensure that you don't introduce regressions in recent changes.

Android offers two benchmarking libraries and approaches for analyzing and testing different kinds of situations in your app: Macrobenchmark and Microbenchmark.

Macrobenchmark

The Macrobenchmark library measures larger end-user interactions, such as startup, interacting with the UI, and animations. The library provides direct control over the performance environment you're testing. It lets you control compiling and lets you start and stop your app to directly measure actual app startup or scrolling.

The Macrobenchmark library injects events and monitors results externally from a test app that is built with your tests. Therefore, when writing the benchmarks, you don't call your app code directly and instead navigate within your app as a user.

Microbenchmark

The Microbenchmark library lets you benchmark app code directly in a loop. This is designed for measuring CPU work that assesses best-case performance—such as warmed up Just in Time (JIT) and disk accesses cached—that you might see with an inner-loop or a specific hot function. ​​The library can only measure the code that you can call directly in isolation.

If your app needs to process a complex data structure, or have some specific computation-heavy algorithm that is called multiple times during the app run, these might be good cases for benchmarking. You can also measure parts of your UI. For example, you can measure the cost of the RecyclerView item binding, how long it takes to inflate a layout, or how demanding the layout-and-measure pass of your View class is from a performance perspective.

However, you aren't able to measure how the benchmarked cases contribute to the overall user experience. In some scenarios, benchmarking doesn't tell you if you're improving a bottleneck like jank or app startup time. For this reason, it's crucial to identify those bottlenecks first with the Android Profiler. After you find the code you want to investigate and optimize, the benchmarked loop can run repeatedly in a quick and easier fashion to create less noisy results, which lets you focus on one area of improvement.

The Microbenchmark library only reports information about your app, not about the system overall. Therefore, it's best at analyzing performance of situations specific to the app, not ones that might relate to overall system issues.

Benchmark library comparison

	Macrobenchmark	Microbenchmark
API version	23 and later	14 and later
Function	Measure high-level entry points or interactions, such as activity launch or scrolling a list.	Measure individual functions.
Scope	Out-of-process test of full app.	In-process test of CPU work.
Speed	Medium iteration speed. It can exceed a minute.	Fast iteration speed. Often less than 10 seconds.
Tracing	Results come with profiling traces.	Optional method sampling and tracing.