How Developers Detect and Fix Performance Bottlenecks in Android Apps - ICSME 2015 Online Appendix
This web page is a companion to our ICSME 2015 paper entitled "How Developers Detect and Fix Performance Bottlenecks in Android Apps".
1. Design of the study: Programming experience of survey participants
2. Tools -- Tools used by Android Developers to Detect Performance-related Issues
| Purpose | Tool/Suite |
| Profiling-Monitoring | MAT, TraceView, DDMS, Android Device Monitor, ADT, ADB, Strict Mode API, OpenGL Tracer, ADB profiler, Android Debug API, Heapdump, Surface Flinger, HProf, Dumpsys, Dmtracedump, Eclipse profiler, Systrace, Trepn, Valgring/Calgrind, Intel Studio, AT & T ARO, Emmagee, Procrank, Chrome trace tool, NewRelic, Adreno profiler, IntelliJ, LittleEye, Netbeans Profiler, Nvidia Nsight, Perf, VisualVM, High Performance C++ profiler, TOP, Linux process monitor, Acra, Charles Network Analyzer, Crashlytics |
| Testing | Roboelectric, JUnit, Appium, Robotium, Xdotool+ Geniemotion, Robospock, Monkey, MonkeyRunner |
| Debugging | Eclipse debugger, GDB, JDB, SQLITE Explain Query Plan, Nvidia Nsight |
| Static Analysis | Sonar, Lint, FindBugs |
| GUI-based analysis | Hierarchy Viewer, Android overdraw visualizer, Surface flinger, OpenGL tracer |
| Analytics | GoogleAnalytics, MintSplunk, Crashlytics, NewRelic |
| Logging | LogCat, Custom logging systems |
| Other | Jenkins, Git Bisec, Android Battery Stats, Caliper |
3. Results
> How developers detect performance bottlenecks in mobile Apps
The figure depicts how developers detect performance bottlenecks in mobile Apps. (Review/issue reports | Manual testing | Tools | Other strategies | None)
> Word Cloud of Android tools
The figure depicts Android tools used by the developers.
> Word Cloud of Android tools
The figure depicts the third-party tools used by the participants.
> The Taxonomy of Practices for Improving Performance Bottlenecks: Categories, Groups, and Answer Frequencies
| Category | Group (frequency) |
| GUI lagging | Threads (74), GUI optimization (47), Caching (40), Memory management (32), Network resources (17), Avoid blocking operations (5), Delegation (cloud) (4), On-demand resources (2), Others (3) |
| Memory bloat | GUI optimization (45), Memory mgmt (30), Network resoruces (5), On-demand resources (2), Etc (2) |
| Energy leak | Delegation (4), Reduce GPS calls (1), Wakelock (1) |
| General | Dsign (74), Optimizations (68), Observation-driven analysis (61), Testing (24), Native code (13), APIs (10), DB-optimizations (5) |
| Unclear benefit | No reflection (1), Depend. Injection (1), Recursion (1) |
The detailed information of the taxonomy is available as a Excel spreadsheet.
> The data (survey responses)
The detailed information of the survey responses is available as a Excel spreadsheet.
> Some Examples (bugs & commits)
- An example of the threading practice in the repository of the Sgtpuzzle app (Sgtpuzzle app, Issue, Commit-1, Commit-2, Commit-3, Commit-4)
- An example of GUI lagging generated by screen update frequency in the PresureNet app (PresureNet app, Issue, Commit)
- An example of how to avoid memory blots in an Android app (Android app, Issue, Commit)
- An example of how micro-optimizations can improve performance in the Android-Universal-Image-Loader app (Android-Universal-Image-Loader app, Issue, Commit)
- An example of memory leak issue in the Android-Universal-Image-Loader app (Android-Universal-Image-Loader app, Issue, Commit)
- An example of the tradeoff between quality attributes in Novoda image-loader library (Novoda image-loader app, Issue, Commit)
- An example of GUI-related performance issue in Mupen64Plus-ae app (Mupen64Plus-ae app, Issue, Commit-1, Commit-2)
> Some Examples (bugs without fix)
- An example of the Video performance issue in Mupen64Plus-ae (Mupen64Plus-ae app, Issue)
- Another example of the Video performance issue in Mupen64Plus-ae (Mupen64Plus-ae app, Issue)
- An example of the Video plugin-related performance issue in Mupen64Plus-ae (Mupen64Plus-ae app, Issue)
- An example of the GUI-related performance issue in ownCloud Android app (ownCloud Android app, Issue)
- An example of the GPU-related performance issue in ownCloud Android app (ownCloud Android app, Issue)
- An example of the UI-related performance issue in ownCloud Android app (ownCloud Android app, Issue)
- An example of the GUI-related performance issue in Sgtpuzzle (Sgtpuzzle app, Issue)
- An example of the image caching issue in the Android-Universal-Image-Loader app (Android-Universal-Image-Loader app, Issue)
4. Authors
- Mario Linares-Vásquez
- The College of William and Mary, VA, USA.
E-mail: mlinarev at cs dot wm dot edu - Christopher Vendome
- The College of William and Mary, VA, USA.
E-mail: cvendome at cs dot wm dot edu - Qi Luo
- The College of William and Mary, VA, USA.
E-mail: qluo at cs dot wm dot edu - Denys Poshyvanyk
- The College of William and Mary.
E-mail: denys at cs dot wm dot edu
5. Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all the open source Android developers who took time to participate in our survey. This work is supported in part by the NSF CCF-1218129 and NSF-1253837 grants. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed herein are the authors' and do not necessarily reflect those of the sponsors.
