Detect causes of performance problems?

I have an android app that is getting fairly large and complex now, and it seems to have intermittent performance problems. One time I will run the app and it's fine, another time it will struggle when switching views.

开发者_StackOverflowHow can I detect the causes of the performance problem using debugging tools so that I may correct it?

Use the ddms tool which comes with the SDK. It has a nice feature called Allocation Tracker that allows you to see in real time how much memory your code is consuming and what specific line is causing that.

Most of the cases your app will slow down because of bad adapter implementations, poor layout inflation techniques or not using a cache system to decode Bitmaps (such as using SoftReference).

Take a look at this article for a brief explanation: Tracking Memory Allocations

In addition to the tool Cristian mentioned, Traceview is another helpful one. It's not very well documented but it can give you information about how often methods are being called, and which methods are taking a lot of time.

Another good memory tracking tool is MAT, here is a page that describes how to use it with Android: http://ttlnews.blogspot.com/2010/01/attacking-memory-problems-on-android.html

Both the tracing and the heap dumps can be done through the DDMS panel, if you prefer not to work with the command line. In Eclipse, in the devices panel, under the device/emulator you are using, click on your app (listed by package name), and you can then Start/Stop Method Profiling to get a trace and you can use Dump HPROF to get a heap dump. Note, the dumps need to be converted to work with the MAT plugin. The attacking-memory-problems-on-android above describes how to do that.