Googlers, for design doc see: http://go/heapprofd-design
heapprofd requires Android Q.
heapprofd is a tool that tracks native heap allocations & deallocations of an
Android process within a given time period. The resulting profile can be used
to attribute memory usage to particular function callstacks, supporting a mix
of both native and java code. The tool should be useful to Android platform
developers, and app developers investigating memory issues.
On debug Android builds, you can profile all apps and most system services.
On "user" builds, you can only use it on apps with the debuggable or
profileable manifest flag.
Use the tools/heap_profile script to heap profile a process. If you are
having trouble make sure you are using the [latest version](
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/catapult-project/perfetto/master/tools/heap_profile).
See all the arguments using tools/heap_profile -h, or use the defaults
and just profile a process (e.g. system_server):
$ tools/heap_profile --name system_server
Profiling active. Press Ctrl+C to terminate.
^CWrote profiles to /tmp/heap_profile-XSKcZ3i (symlink /tmp/heap_profile-latest)
These can be viewed using pprof. Googlers: head to pprof/ and upload them.
This will create a pprof-compatible heap dump when Ctrl+C is pressed.
The resulting profile proto contains four views on the data
Googlers: Head to http://pprof/ and upload the gzipped protos to get a
visualization. Tip: you might want to put libart.so as a "Hide regex" when
profiling apps.
Speedscope can also be used to visualize the heap
dump, but will only show the space view. Tip: Click Left Heavy on the top
left for a good visualisation.
heapprofd samples heap allocations. Given a sampling interval of n bytes,
one allocation is sampled, on average, every n bytes allocated. This allows to
reduce the performance impact on the target process. The default sampling rate
is 4096 bytes.
The easiest way to reason about this is to imagine the memory allocations as a
steady stream of one byte allocations. From this stream, every n-th byte is
selected as a sample, and the corresponding allocation gets attributed the
complete n bytes. As an optimization, we sample allocations larger than the
sampling interval with their true size.
To make this statistically more meaningful, Poisson sampling is employed.
Instead of a static parameter of n bytes, the user can only choose the mean
value around which the interval is distributed. This makes sure frequent small
allocations get sampled as well as infrequent large ones.
When a profile session names processes by name and a matching process is
started, it gets profiled from the beginning. The resulting profile will
contain all allocations done between the start of the process and the end
of the profiling session.
On Android, Java apps are usually not started, but the zygote forks and then
specializes into the desired app. If the app's name matches a name specified
in the profiling session, profiling will be enabled as part of the zygote
specialization. The resulting profile contains all allocations done between
that point in zygote specialization and the end of the profiling session.
Some allocations done early in the specialization process are not accounted
for.
The Resulting ProfileProto will have from_startup set to true in the
corresponding ProcessHeapSamples message. This does not get surfaced in the
converted pprof compatible proto.
When a profile session is started, all matching processes (by name or PID)
are enumerated and profiling is enabled. The resulting profile will contain
all allocations done between the beginning and the end of the profiling
session.
The Resulting ProfileProto will have from_startup set to false in the
corresponding ProcessHeapSamples message. This does not get surfaced in the
converted pprof compatible proto.
If multiple sessions name the same target process (either by name or PID),
only the first relevant session will profile the process. The other sessions
will report that the process had already been profiled when converting to
the pprof compatible proto.
If you see this message but do not expect any other sessions, run adb shell killall -KILL perfetto
to stop any concurrent sessions that may be running.
The Resulting ProfileProto will have rejected_concurrent set to true in
otherwise empty corresponding ProcessHeapSamples message. This does not get
surfaced in the converted pprof compatible proto.
Depending on the build of Android that heapprofd is run on, some processes
are not be eligible to be profiled.
On user builds, only Java applications with either the profileable or the
debugable manifest flag set can be profiled. Profiling requests for other
processes will result in an empty profile.
On userdebug builds, all processes except for a small blacklist of critical
services can be profiled. This restriction can be lifted by disabling
SELinux by running adb shell su root setenforce 0 or by passing--disable-selinux to the heap_profile script.
| userdebug setenforce 0 | userdebug | user | |
|---|---|---|---|
| critical native service | y | n | n |
| native service | y | y | n |
| app | y | y | n |
| profileable app | y | y | y |
| debugable app | y | y | y |
If the rate of allocations is too high for heapprofd to keep up, the profiling
session will end early due to a buffer overrun. If the buffer overrun is
caused by a transient spike in allocations, increasing the shared memory buffer
size (passing --shmem-size to heap_profile) can resolve the issue.
Otherwise the sampling interval can be increased (at the expense of lower
accuracy in the resulting profile) by passing --interval to heap_profile.
Check whether your target process is eligible to be profiled by consulting
Target processes above.
When using heapprofd and interpreting results, it is important to know the
precise meaning of the different memory metrics that can be obtained from the
operating system.
heapprofd gives you the number of bytes the target program
requested from the allocator. If you are profiling a Java app from startup,
allocations that happen early in the application's initialization will not be
visibile to heapprofd. Native services that do not fork from the Zygote
are not affected by this.
malloc_info is a libc function that gives you information about the
allocator. This can be triggered on userdebug builds by usingam dumpheap -m <PID> /data/local/tmp/heap.txt. This will in general be more
than the memory seen by heapprofd, depending on the allocator not all memory
is immediately freed. In particular, jemalloc retains some freed memory in
thread caches.
Heap RSS is the amount of memory requested from the operating system by the
allocator. This is larger than the previous two numbers because memory can only
be obtained in page size chunks, and fragmentation causes some of that memory to
be wasted. This can be obtained by running adb shell dumpsys meminfo <PID> and
looking at the "Private Dirty" column.
| heapprofd | malloc_info | RSS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| from native startup | x | x | x |
| after zygote init | x | x | x |
| before zygote init | x | x | |
| thread caches | x | x | |
| fragmentation | x |
If you observe high RSS or malloc_info metrics but heapprofd does not match,
there might be a problem with fragmentation or the allocator.
It is not recommended to use these instructions unless you have advanced
requirements or are developing heapprofd. Proceed with caution
Download the latest trace_to_text for [Linux](
https://storage.googleapis.com/perfetto/trace_to_text-4ab1d18e69bc70e211d27064505ed547aa82f919)
or MacOS.
This is needed to convert the Perfetto trace to a pprof-compatible file.
Compare the sha1sum of this file to the one contained in the file name.
To start profiling the process ${PID}, run the following sequence of commands.
Adjust the INTERVAL to trade-off runtime impact for higher accuracy of the
results. If INTERVAL=1, every allocation is sampled for maximum accuracy.
Otherwise, a sample is taken every INTERVAL bytes on average.
INTERVAL=4096
echo '
buffers {
size_kb: 100024
}
data_sources {
config {
name: "android.heapprofd"
target_buffer: 0
heapprofd_config {
sampling_interval_bytes: '${INTERVAL}'
pid: '${PID}'
}
}
}
duration_ms: 20000
' | adb shell perfetto --txt -c - -o /data/misc/perfetto-traces/profile
adb pull /data/misc/perfetto-traces/profile /tmp/profile
While we work on UI support, you can convert the trace into pprof compatible
heap dumps.
Use the trace_to_text file downloaded above, with XXXXXXX replaced with thesha1sum of the file.
trace_to_text-linux-XXXXXXX profile /tmp/profile
This will create a directory in /tmp/ containing the heap dumps. Run
gzip /tmp/heap_profile-XXXXXX/*.pb
to get gzipped protos, which tools handling pprof profile protos expect.
Follow the instructions in Viewing the Data to visualise
the results.