Docs: Launch-time performance doc for upcoming Performance section on DAC.

page.title=Launch-Time Performance

@jd:body

<div id="qv-wrapper">

<div id="qv">

<h2>In this document</h2>

<ol>

<li><a href="#internals">Launch Internals</a>

  <ol>

    <li><a href="#cold">Cold start</a></li>

    <li><a href="#warm">Warm start</a></li>

    <li><a href="#lukewarm">Lukewarm start</a></li>

  </ol>

</li>

<li><a href="#profiling">Profiling Launch Performance</a>

  <ol>

    <li><a href="#time-initial">Time to initial display</a></li>

    <li><a href="#time-full">Time to full display</a></li>

  </ol>

</li>

<li><a href="#common">Common Issues</a>

   <ol>

      <li><a href="#heavy-app">Heavy app initialization</a></li>

      <li><a href="#heavy-act">Heavy activity initialization</a></li>

      <li><a href="#themed">Themed launch screens</a></li>

   </ol>

      </li>

</ol>

</div>

</div>

<p>

Users expect apps to be responsive and fast to load. An app with a slow startup

time doesn’t meet this expectation, and can be disappointing to users. This

sort of poor experience may cause a user to rate your app poorly on the Play

store, or even abandon your app altogether.

</p>

<p>

This document provides information to help you optimize your app’s launch time.

It begins by explaining the internals of the launch process. Next, it discusses

how to profile startup performance. Last, it describes some common startup-time

issues, and gives some hints on how to address them.

</p>

<h2 id="internals">Launch Internals</h2>

<p>

App launch can take place in one of three states, each affecting how

long it takes for your app to become visible to the user: cold start,

warm start, and lukewarm start. In a cold start, your app starts from scratch.

In the other states, the system needs to bring the app from the background to

the foreground. We recommend that you always optimize based on an assumption of

a cold start. Doing so can improve the performance of warm and lukewarm starts,

as well.

</p>

<p>

To optimize your app for fast startup, it’s useful to understand what’s

happening at the system and app levels, and how they interact, in each of

these states.

</p>

<h3 id="cold">Cold start</h3>

<p>

A cold start refers to an app’s starting from scratch: the system’s process

has not, until this start, created the app’s process. Cold starts happen in

cases such as your app’s being launched for the first time since the device

booted, or since the system killed the app. This type of start presents the

greatest challenge in terms of minimizing startup time, because the system

and app have more work to do than in the other launch states.

</p>

<p>

At the beginning of a cold start, the system has three tasks. These tasks are:

</p>

<ol style="1">

   <li>Loading and launching the app.</li>

   <li>Displaying a blank starting window for the app immediately after launch.

   </li>

   <li>Creating the app

   <a href="{docRoot}guide/components/processes-and-threads.html#Processes">

   process.</a></li>

</ol>

<br/>

<p>

As soon as the system creates the app process, the app process is responsible

for the next stages. These stages are:

</p>

<ol style="1">

   <li>Creating the app object.</li>

   <li>Launching the main thread.</li>

   <li>Creating the main activity.</li>

   <li>Inflating views.</li>

   <li>Laying out the screen.</li>

   <li>Performing the initial draw.</li>

</ol>

<p>

Once the app process has completed the first draw, the system process swaps

out the currently displayed background window, replacing it with the main

activity. At this point, the user can start using the app.

</p>

<p>

Figure 1 shows how the system and app processes hand off work between each

other.

</p>

<br/>

  <img src="{@docRoot}performance/images/cold-launch.png">

  <p class="img-caption">

    <strong>Figure 1.</strong> A visual representation of the important parts of

    a cold application launch.

  </p>

<p>

Performance issues can arise during creation of the app and

creation of the activity.

</p>

<h4 id="app-creation">Application creation</h4>

<p>

When your application launches, the blank starting window remains on the screen

until the system finishes drawing the app for the first time. At that point,

the system process swaps out the starting window for your app, allowing the

user to start interacting with the app.

</p>

<p>

If you’ve overloaded {@link android.app.Application#onCreate() Application.oncreate()}

in your own app, the app starts by calling this

method on your app object. Afterwards, the app spawns the main thread, also

known as the UI thread, and tasks it with creating your main activity.

</p>

<p>

From this point, system- and app-level processes proceed in accordance with

the <a href="{docRoot}guide/topics/processes/process-lifecycle.html">

app lifecycle stages</a>.

</p>

<h4 id="act-creation">Activity creation</h4>

<p>

After the app process creates your activity, the activity performs the

following operations:

</p>

<ol style="1">

   <li>Initializes values.</li>

   <li>Calls constructors.</li>

   <li>Calls the callback method, such as

   {@link android.app.Activity#onCreate(android.os.Bundle) Activity.onCreate()},

   appropriate to the current lifecycle state of the activity.</li>

</ol>

<p>

Typically, the

{@link android.app.Activity#onCreate(android.os.Bundle) onCreate()}

method has the greatest impact on load time, because it performs the work with

the highest overhead: loading and inflating views, and initializing the objects

needed for the activity to run.

</p>

<h3 id="warm">Warm start</h3>

<p>

A warm start of your application is much simpler and lower-overhead than a

cold start. In a warm start, all the system does is bring your activity to

the foreground. If all of your application’s activities are still resident in

memory, then the app can avoid having to repeat object initialization, layout

inflation, and rendering.

</p>

<p>

However, if some memory has been purged in response to memory trimming

events, such as

{@link android.content.ComponentCallbacks2#onTrimMemory(int) onTrimMemory()},

then those objects will need to be recreated in

response to the warm start event.

</p>

<p>

A warm start displays the same on-screen behavior as a cold start scenario:

The system process displays a blank screen until the app has finished rendering

the activity.

</p>

<h3 id="lukewarm">Lukewarm start</h3>

<p>

A lukewarm start encompasses some subset of the operations that

take place during a cold start; at the same time, it represents less overhead

than a warm start. There are many potential states that could be considered

lukewarm starts. For instance:

</p>

<ul>

   <li>The user backs out of your app, but then re-launches it. The process may

       have continued to run, but the app must recreate the activity from scratch

       via a call to

       {@link android.app.Activity#onCreate(android.os.Bundle) onCreate()}.</li>

   <li>The system evicts your app from memory, and then the user re-launches it.

       The process and the Activity need to be restarted, but the task can

       benefit somewhat from the saved instance state bundle passed into

       {@link android.app.Activity#onCreate(android.os.Bundle) onCreate()}.</li>

</ul>

<h2 id="profiling">Profiling Launch Performance</h2>

<p>

In order to properly diagnose start time performance, you can track metrics

that show how long it takes your application to start.

</p>

<h3 id="time-initial">Time to initial display</h3>

<p>

From Android 4.4 (API level 19), logcat includes an output line containing

a value called {@code Displayed}. This value represents

the amount of time elapsed between launching the process and finishing drawing

the corresponding activity on the screen. The elapsed time encompasses the

following sequence of events:

</p>

<ol style="1">

   <li>Launch the process.</li>

   <li>Initialize the objects.</li>

   <li>Create and initialize the activity.</li>

   <li>Inflate the layout.</li>

   <li>Draw your application for the first time.</li>

</ol>

<p>

The reported log line looks similar to the following example:

</p>

<pre class="no-pretty-print">

ActivityManager: Displayed com.android.myexample/.StartupTiming: +3s534ms

</pre>

<p>

If you’re tracking logcat output from the command line, or in a terminal,

finding the elapsed time is straightforward. To find elapsed time in

Android Studio, you must disable filters in your logcat view. Disabling the

filters is necessary because the system server, not the app itself, serves

this log.

</p>

<p>

Once you’ve made the appropriate settings, you can easily search for the

correct term to see the time. Figure 2 shows how to disable filters, and,

in the second line of output from the bottom, an example of logcat output of

the {@code Displayed} time.

</p>

<br/>

  <img src="{@docRoot}performance/images/displayed-logcat.png">

  <p class="img-caption">

    <strong>Figure 2.</strong> Disabling filters, and

    finding the {@code Displayed} value in logcat.

  </p>

<p>

The {@code Displayed} metric in the logcat output does not necessarily capture

the amount of time until all resources are loaded and displayed: it leaves out

resources that are not referenced in the layout file or that the app creates

as part of object initialization. It excludes these resources because loading

them is an inline process, and does not block the app’s initial display.

</p>

<h3 id="time-full">Time to full display</h3>

<p>

You can use the {@link android.app.Activity#reportFullyDrawn()} method to

measure the elapsed time

between application launch and complete display of all resources and view

hierarchies. This can be valuable in cases where an app performs lazy loading.

In lazy loading, an app does not block the initial drawing of the window, but

instead asynchronously loads resources and updates the view hierarchy.

</p>

<p>

If, due to lazy loading, an app’s initial display does not include all

resources, you might consider the completed loading and display of all

resources and views as a separate metric: For example, your UI might be

fully loaded, with some text drawn, but not yet display images that the

app must fetch from the network.

</p>

<p>

To address this concern, you can manually call

{@link android.app.Activity#reportFullyDrawn()}

to let the system know that your activity is

finished with its lazy loading. When you use this method, the value

that logcat displays is the time elapsed

since the creation of the application object, and the moment

{@link android.app.Activity#reportFullyDrawn()} is called.

</p>

<p>

If you learn that your display times are slower than you’d like, you can

go on to try to identify the bottlenecks in the startup process.

</p>

<h4 id="bottlenecks">Identifying bottlenecks</h4>

<p>

Two good ways to look for bottlenecks are Android Studio’s Method Tracer tool

and inline tracing. To learn about Method Tracer, see that tool’s

<a href="{docRoot}studio/profile/am-methodtrace.html">documentation</a>.

</p>

<p>

If you do not have access to the Method Tracer tool, or cannot start the tool

at the correct time to gain log information, you can gain similar insight

through inline tracing inside of your apps’ and activities’ {@code onCreate()}

methods. To learn about inline tracing, see the reference documentation for

the {@link android.os.Trace} functions, and for the

<a href="{docRoot}studio/profile/systrace-commandline.html">Systrace</a> tool.

</p>

<h2 id="common">Common Issues</h2>

<p>

This section discusses several issues that often affect apps’ startup

performance. These issues chiefly concern initializing app and activity

objects, as well as the loading of screens.

</p>

<h3 id="heavy-app">Heavy app initialization</h3>

<p>

Launch performance can suffer when your code overrides the {@code Application}

object, and executes heavy work or complex logic when initializing that object.

Your app may waste time during startup if your Application subclasses perform

initializations that don’t need to be done yet. Some initializations may be

completely unnecessary: for example, initializing state information for the

main activity, when the app has actually started up in response to an intent.

With an intent, the app uses only a subset of the previously initialized state

data.

</p>

<p>

Other challenges during app initialization include garbage-collection events

that are impactful or numerous, or disk I/O happening concurrently with

initialization, further blocking the initialization process. Garbage collection

is especially a consideration with the Dalvik runtime; the Art runtime performs

garbage collection concurrently, minimizing that operation's impact.

</p>

<h4 id="diagnosing-1">Diagnosing the problem</h4>

<p>

You can use method tracing or inline tracing to try to diagnose the problem.

</p>

<h5>Method tracing</h5>

<p>

Running the Method Tracer tool reveals that the

{@link android.app.Instrumentation#callApplicationOnCreate(android.app.Application) callApplicationOnCreate()}

method eventually calls your {@code com.example.customApplication.onCreate}

method. If the tool shows that these

methods are taking a long time to finish executing, you should explore further

to see what work is occurring there.

</p>

<h5>Inline tracing</h5>

<p>

Use inline tracing to investigate likely culprits including:

</p>

<ul>

   <li>Your app’s initial {@link android.app.Application#onCreate()}

   function.</li>

   <li>Any global singleton objects your app initializes.</li>

   <li>Any disk I/O, deserialization, or tight loops that might be occurring

   during the bottleneck.

</ul>

<h4 id="solutions-1">Solutions to the problem</h4>

<p>

Whether the problem lies with unnecessary initializations or disk I/O,

the solution calls for lazy-initializing objects: initializing only those

objects that are immediately needed. For example, rather than creating global

static objects, instead, move to a singleton pattern, where the app initalizes

objects only the first time it accesses them.

</p>

<h3 id="heavy-act">Heavy activity initialization</h4>

<p>

Activity creation often entails a lot of high-overhead work. Often, there are

opportunities to optimize this work to achieve performance improvements. Such

common issues include:

</p>

<ul>

   <li>Inflating large or complex layouts.</li>

   <li>Blocking screen drawing on disk, or network I/O.</li>

   <li>Loading and decoding bitmaps.</li>

   <li>Rasterizing {@link android.graphics.drawable.VectorDrawable VectorDrawable} objects.</li>

   <li>Initialization of other subsystems of the activity.</li>

</ul>

<h4 id="diagnosing-2">Diagnosing the problem</h4>

<p>

In this case, as well, both method tracing and inline tracing can prove useful.

</p>

<h5>Method tracing</h5>

<p>

When running the Method Tracer tool, the particular areas to

focus on your your app’s {@link android.app.Application} subclass constructors and

{@code com.example.customApplication.onCreate()} methods.

</p>

<p>

If the tool shows that these methods are taking a long time to finish

executing, you should explore further to see what work is occurring there.

</p>

<h5>Inline tracing</h5>

<p>

Use inline tracing to investigate likely culprits including:

</p>

<ul>

   <li>Your app’s initial {@link android.app.Application#onCreate()}

   function.</li>

   <li>Any global singleton objects it initializes.</li>

   <li>Any disk I/O, deserialization, or tight loops that might be occurring

   during the bottleneck.</li>

</ul>

<h4 id="solutions-2">Solutions to the problem</h4>

<p>

There are many potential bottlenecks, but two common problems and remedies

are as follows:

</p>

<ul>

   <li>The larger your view hierarchy, the more time the app takes to inflate

   it. Two steps you can take to address this issue are:

   <ul>

      <li>Flattening your view hierarchy by reducing redundant or nested

      layouts.</li>

      <li>Not inflating parts of the UI that do not need to be visible during

      launch. Instead, use use a {@link android.view.ViewStub} object as a

      placeholder for sub-hierarchies that the app can inflate at a more

      appropriate time.</li>

   </ul>

   </li>

   <li>Having all of your resource initialization on the main

       thread can also slow down startup. You can address this issue as follows:

   <ul>

      <li>Move all resource initialization so that the app can perform it

      lazily on a different thread.</li>

      <li>Allow the app to load and display your views, and then later

      update visual properties that are dependent on bitmaps and other

      resources.</li>

   </ul>

   </li>

<h3 id="themed">Themed launch screens</h3>

<p>

You may wish to theme your app’s loading experience, so that the app’s

launch screen is thematically consistent with the rest of the app, instead of

with the system theming. Doing so can hide a slow activity launch.

</p>

<p>

A common way to implement a themed launch screen is to use the the

{@link android.R.attr#windowDisablePreview} theme attribute to turn off

the initial blank screen

that the system process draws when launching the app. However, this approach

can result in a longer startup time than apps that don’t suppress the preview

window. Also, it forces the user to wait with no feedback while the activity

launches, making them wonder if the app is functioning properly.

</p>

<h4 id="diagnosing-3">Diagnosing the problem</h4>

<p>

You can often diagnose this problem by observing a slow response when a user

launches your app. In such a case, the screen may seem to be frozen, or to

have stopped responding to input.

</p>

<h4 id="solutions-3">Solutions to the problem</h4>

<p>

We recommend that, rather than disabling the preview window, you

follow the common

<a href="http://www.google.com/design/spec/patterns/launch-screens.html#">

Material Design</a> patterns. You can use the activity's

{@code windowBackground} theme attribute to provide a simple custom drawable

for the starting activity.

</p>

<p>

For example, you might create a new drawable file and reference it from the

layout XML and app manifest file as follows:

</p>

<p>Layout XML file:</p>

<pre>

<layer-list xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:opacity="opaque">

  <!-- The background color, preferably the same as your normal theme -->

  <item android:drawable="@android:color/white"/>

  <!-- Your product logo - 144dp color version of your app icon -->

  <item>

    <bitmap

      android:src="@drawable/product_logo_144dp"

      android:gravity="center"/>

  </item>

</layer-list>

</pre>

<p>Manifest file:</p>

<pre>

<activity ...

android:theme="@style/AppTheme.Launcher" />

</pre>

<p>

The easiest way to transition back to your normal theme is to call

{@link android.view.ContextThemeWrapper#setTheme(int) setTheme(R.style.AppTheme)}

before calling {@code super.onCreate()} and {@code setContentView()}:

</p>

<pre class="no-pretty-print">

public class MyMainActivity extends AppCompatActivity {

  @Override

  protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {

    // Make sure this is before calling super.onCreate

    setTheme(R.style.Theme_MyApp);

    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

    // ...

  }

}

</pre>