The Programming Blog

Running Systrace for android

Measuring time taken by app to launch

Go to verbose of logacat in Android monitor
Select no filters
Search for Displayed
Run your app
Time taken for every Activity to draw and display will be provoded in ms

1. Method Tracing

To run Method Tracing do following -

1. Pre requisite -

Tools > Android > Enable ADB Integration

• Android Device Monitor can’t be running. (Android Monitor is different thing , don't mix up)
• set your app debuggable in build.gradle file (app)
• 2. Now use Android Monitor as -
• View > Tool Windows > Android Monitor.
• Go to monitor Tab - to shift between the log and monitor tab , see on the right top, a icon is present that allows you to do so as given here - https://developer.android.com/images/tools/am-imaxlogcat.png
• Connect your device 
• Click a clock to start method tracing just after starting your app. Click clock again to stop method tracing, You will get Result in the editor tab (where tabs of xml/java files are present). Click the tab and in bottom section you will find all the methods along with their inclusive and exclusive time. Click inclusive tab to sort them by highest or lowest time.
• Thus you can see the methods taking most of your time.

2. Systrace Tool

Pre - You must have systrace enabled in your android device - go to Settings -> Dev Options -> Monitoring -> Profile GPU rendering - in adb.....
->Enable opengl traces - systrace

To run this - You should have pip installed - So I installed pip and using pip installed

sudo easy_install pip

pip install pyserial

- Using Command Line 

After this - Run the following command -

 cd  Users/sachinaggarwal/Library/Android/sdk/platform-tools/systrace

python systrace.py --time=10 -o mynewtrace.html sched gfx view wm

If you get error that Is adb on your path - You need to add adb to your environment variables as -

echo "export PATH=\$PATH:/Users/${USER}/Library/Android/sdk/platform-tools/" >> ~/.bash_profile

In place of ${USER} enter your username

After this you need to quit the terminal and reopen it to see the effect.

Open Terminal, Connect your device and reenter the following commands

cd  Users/sachinaggarwal/Library/Android/sdk/platform-tools/systrace
python systrace.py --time=10 -o mynewtrace1.html sched gfx view wm
Your inline trace will be saved in mynewtrace.html. Open it and analyze

2nd Option - Run in Android Studio in Android Device Monitor -

Additional prereq - For ADM to run, you must have ADB integration disabled. (disabled by defualt so no problem)

Prob - You may find that you are enable to run your project (it will ask you to enable adb integration). This is because instant run requires adb integration. SO -> Go to Settings and disable instant run -> You will be now able to run your app as well as ADM.
In ADM, open devices tab and select your device and on it select systrace icon to start taking systrace.






Analysing trace file -

To analyse the trace file you can click any of red part in trace but the easiest way is to Go to Right -> Choose alerts tab -> you will see all the problems by choosing any alert and also get video links or android doc suggestions about your problem - thats how easy it is

You may look at traceview in future - https://developer.android.com/studio/profile/traceview.html

Hackathons are always awesome !! You build a product, interact with other hackers and overdose yourself off caffeine. And if we get unlimited RedBull, then it's just 10X Awesomeness.

My team was selected into the finals of Smart India Hackathon. We were selected for the Indian Space Research Organisation category.

Problem Statement: Novel Solution for preventing a breach of the confidential file from the organization other than already available methods in networking. The solution should also prevent uploading of data to the internet.

Solution: Our idea for this was a client-side solution: On every employee system, we will partition the system volume into two parts: Public and Confidential. Public Volume contains all the data that can go outside organization without any concern. Confidential Area contains all the confidential data deployed by system admin into this volume.

The Confidential Area will be completely isolated i.e. None of the following can be done on files of this area: Cut, Copy, Send To, Save As, Paste, Delete, Drag and Drop and many more commands. This ensures that none of the files from the confidential area can move to the public area or external drives.

What about uploading to Internet/Mail/Backend Script ?? How can we stop this ??

Our solution to this problem was: When the user wants to open confidential area, the user has to use our File Viewer tool to open the files.
At all other times, all the permission on file of the Confidential area will be revoked. This means that if the user tries to upload a file, it will be corrupt. The user may try bash script, program or any other way, it will not work because file simply does not exist without permissions.

File permissions will only be granted when the user opens the confidential file in File Viewer. Also, during this time (when File Viewer is opened), we are checking that FileViewer is in focus. Because the user can open File Viewer and then take advantage of granted file permissions.

We also handled a lot of other edge cases and were able to develop 60% of our product (Isolation part was done completely using a combination of registry modification, clipboard listeners to clear clipboard when copied data comes in, etc).

The further product development will be carried on after instructions from Indian Space Research Organisation.

This was my first Hackathon. And I bet, more are coming.

Many times Android Studio just wouldn't work. You will see some weird errors while building and stackoverflow will also fail you on this.

Its 4.30 in the night (or just call it morning) and here I am discussing interesting issue I came across in PowerUp Game a couple of days back.

Winning the 4th Edition of Discover Thinking Contest by CSI