Lightweight iOS performance profiling

Question

I need to do some performance profiling of an iOS app (including CPU usage, Memory usage, network usage). I need a way to store the results with graphs of what those metrics look like to compare over time. I need useful/helpful graphs and hopefully smallish in size, I’m not necessarily interested in stack traces across all threads for each time slice or any of that type of additional fluff.

I have tried instruments with adding time profiler (and some of the other templates), but I have 2 big issues:

• The graphs are kind of tiny to the eye/not particularly helpful.
• a 30 second profile used up something like 100mb, which is too big for what I’m looking for with regards to long term storage as each profiling session will probably 10+ minutes

Answer 1

You can do 2 things:

• After entering Instruments, there are Record and Pause buttons. You can use Pause button to pause and unpause your desired operation profiling.

• Under Instruments->Preferences->Recording tab, there is a Background Sampling Duration parameter - it allows you to specify how often it records the activity. Play with this parameter. You may get your desired file size.

  • If you observe below screenshot: There is also one more parameter named max backtrace depth. It changes size of your recorded call stack. You can also play with it to observe file size changes.