Perfetto is a collection of open-source tools from Google for recording and analyzing what a piece of software is doing while it runs. Developers use it to figure out why an app starts slowly, why frames drop, or why a system is using too much memory. It is the default tracing system built into the Android operating system and the Chromium browser, so it has been tested at production scale. The project has several parts that work together. There are high-performance background processes that record activity from many programs at once and save it to a single file. There is a lightweight library that C++ developers can add directly to their own code to mark specific events and timings. There are also probes that capture system-wide information on Android and Linux, such as which programs are running, how the CPU is being used, and how memory is being allocated. Once you have a recording, Perfetto provides a browser-based tool for viewing it as a timeline. You can zoom in on specific moments, see how different processes interacted, and trace a slow operation back to its cause. The viewer works in any modern browser and requires no installation. For deeper analysis, Perfetto also has a SQL-based engine, meaning you can write queries to pull out specific measurements or build automated reports. The tool is useful for Android app developers, C and C++ developers on desktop systems, browser engineers, and anyone doing performance investigation on Linux. It can also read trace formats from other tools, including Linux perf and macOS Instruments, so you are not locked into one recording format. Documentation and the browser-based UI are available at perfetto.dev.
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