Performance instrumentation and tracing for Android, Linux and Chrome.
Perfetto is a production-grade open-source stack designed for performance instrumentation, tracing, and analysis across Android, Linux, and Chrome environments. It enables developers to record, analyze, and visualize system-level and application-level traces with precision.
Key Features:
Cross-platform Tracing: Supports comprehensive tracing on Android, Linux, and Chrome.
Heap Profiling: Offers native and Java heap profiling for efficient memory management.
SQL-based Analysis: Provides a library to analyze traces using SQL queries.
Web UI: Features an intuitive web interface for exploring multi-GB traces efficiently.
Tool Integration: Supports integration with build tools like Bazel and GN.
Scalability: Designed for use in large-scale production environments.
Audience & Benefits:
Ideal for developers, performance engineers, and system administrators seeking to optimize application performance. Perfetto helps identify performance bottlenecks, enhance resource usage efficiency, improve app responsiveness, and support informed decision-making in performance engineering.
Perfetto can be installed via winget, ensuring seamless integration into your development workflow.
README
Perfetto - System profiling, app tracing and trace analysis
Perfetto is an open-source suite of SDKs, daemons and tools which use
tracing to help developers understand the behaviour of complex systems and
root-cause functional and performance issues on client and embedded systems.
It is a production-grade tool that is the default tracing system for the
Android operating system and the Chromium browser.
Core Components
Perfetto is not a single tool, but a collection of components that work
together:
High-performance tracing daemons: For capturing tracing information from
many processes on a single machine into a unified trace file.
Low-overhead tracing SDK: A C++17 library for direct
userspace-to-userspace tracing of timings and state changes in your
application.
Extensive OS-level probes: For capturing system-wide context on Android
and Linux (e.g. scheduling states, CPU frequencies, memory profiling,
callstack sampling).
Browser-based UI: A powerful, fully local UI for visualizing and exploring
large, multi-GB traces on a timeline. It works in all major browsers, requires
no installation, and can open traces from other tools.
SQL-based analysis library: A powerful engine that allows you to
programmatically query traces using SQL to automate analysis and extract
custom metrics.
Why Use Perfetto?
Perfetto was designed to be a versatile and powerful tracing system for a wide
range of use cases.
For Android App & Platform Developers: Debug and root-cause functional and
performance issues like slow startups, dropped frames (jank), animation
glitches, low memory kills, and ANRs. Profile both Java/Kotlin and native C++
memory usage with heap dumps and profiles.
For C/C++ Developers (Linux, macOS, Windows): Use the
Tracing SDK to instrument your
application with custom trace points to understand its execution flow, find
performance bottlenecks, and debug complex behavior. On Linux, you can also
perform detailed CPU and native heap profiling.
For Linux Kernel & System Developers: Get deep insights into kernel
behavior. Perfetto acts as an efficient userspace daemon for ftrace,
allowing you to visualize scheduling, syscalls, interrupts, and custom kernel
tracepoints on a timeline.
For Chromium Developers: Perfetto is the tracing backend for
chrome://tracing. Use it to debug and root-cause issues in the browser, V8,
and Blink.
For Performance Engineers & SREs: Analyze and visualize a wide range of
profiling and tracing formats, not just Perfetto's. Use the powerful SQL
interface to programmatically analyze traces from tools like Linux perf,
macOS Instruments, Chrome JSON traces, and more.
Getting Started
We've designed our documentation to guide you to the right information as
quickly as possible, whether you're a newcomer to performance analysis or an
experienced developer.
New to tracing? If you're unfamiliar with concepts like tracing and
profiling, start here:
What is Tracing? - A gentle
introduction to the world of performance analysis.
Ready to dive in? Our "Getting Started" guide is the main entry point
for all users. It will help you find the right tutorials and documentation
for your specific needs:
How do I start using Perfetto? -
Find your path based on your role and goals (e.g., Android App Developer,
C/C++ Developer, etc.).
Want the full overview? For a comprehensive look at what Perfetto is,
why it's useful, and who uses it, see our main documentation page:
