Until a few days ago profiling on b2g was either off or on for the whole system. Worse profiling secondary threads would profile secondary threads of every process. These limitations caused profiling to overwhelm the system and skew performance numbers. Additionally it was difficult to follow how processes waited on each other.

With the landing Bug 914654 it is now possible to profile specific threads on specific processes and merge the results with little effort. Currently profiling secondary threads is disabled on b2g but just locally remove the gonk #ifdef from mozilla_sampler_register_thread and mozilla_sampler_unregister_thread and you’re good to go. Once that’s ready use the profile.sh to start profiling the important threads of your choice. For example if you’re looking into animation delay with the Homescreen you want to run ‘./profile.sh start b2g Compositor && ./profile.sh start Homescreen’ then run ./profile.sh pull which will prepare and merge the data into profile_captured.sym.

Here’s a sample profile collected for the Homescreen swipe animations. Here you can notice the b2g compositor waiting for the paint from the Homescreen then furiously compositing afterwards at nearly 60 FPS. Thus the delay in starting the Homescreen swipe is not caused by the compositor but rather caused by the Homescreen taking too long to rasterize the layers containing the app icons. In this case it’s taking 100ms to prepare which means we’ve missed the first 6 frames of the animation! Happy profiling!