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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.).
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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:
Have questions? Need help?
- GitHub Discussions: For Q&A and general discussions.
- GitHub Issues: For bug reports.
- Discord: For live chat with the community and developers.
We follow Google's Open Source Community Guidelines.
