One of the most difficult problems for app developers is ensuring smooth, glitchless, and jank-free animation. This is especially hard to debug when the system is also performing resource-intensive background tasks. There is no easy way to determine whether some jank is caused by your app or the system. However, there is a profiler tool that can help you identify the possible source of the bad behavior.
Render on ChromeOS
A fine-tuned app, like a game, usually uses double buffering to keep the user response time as low as possible. Still, there are many things that can degrade performance. For example, if rendering a frame takes too long, the rendered result is not ready for the next buffer swap, and consequently the previous frame repeats.
Then, the renderer can't start rendering the next frame, causing even more problems. This scenario is familiar to Android mobile developers; when an app runs on ChromeOS, the context is even more complicated.
An app running on the desktop doesn't render directly to the screen's display frame. It renders its data into a texture instead. There are usually multiple apps, each rendering its graphics into a texture. The system constructs the view on the screen using a compositor to combine all the textures into a single desktop image.
The compositor works transparently in the background. However, it introduces a one-frame time delay to maximize the use of the GPU pipeline. In an ideal world this might not be necessary, but it smooths system performance fluctuations and helps balance an asymmetrical load.
When the OS is working very hard, the GPU might get squeezed. There can be a delay from the time a frame renders to when it appears on the screen. Depending on the hardware, the system might use quadruple buffering to compensate. Even with deeper buffering, the graphic pipeline can still glitch.
The ARC graphics tracer
ChromeOS has a profiling tool that shows how the buffers are percolating through the system, when memory swaps occur, how busy the CPU/GPU is, and what your application is doing at a given time, shown in the following image:
Set up the profiler
To use the profiler, you must run M75 or later. For best results, use an Intel device.
Before using the profiler, seed your app with traces.
Add Trace.traceCounter(Trace.TRACE_TAG_GRAPHICS, "Event", <number>); to your code
wherever you’d like to include a trace. Use an Event that begins with
the prefix customTrace. The prefix doesn't appear in the trace message.
To set up the profiler, follow these steps:
- Turn on developer mode.
- Turn on Chrome settings and enable the ARC graphic buffers visualization tool.
- Navigate to
chrome://arc-graphics-tracing.
Run the profiler
- Select stop on jank.
- Run the Android app.
- When the Android app is active and has focus, press Control+Shift+G.
When some jank happens, a browser window pops up. Use the W and S keys to zoom and shrink the timeline.