Set Up Profiling

Learn how to enable profiling in your app if it is not already set up.

With profiling, Sentry tracks your software's performance by sampling your program's call stack in a variety of environments. This feature collects function-level information about your code and enables you to fine-tune your program's performance. Sentry's profiler captures function calls and their exact locations, aggregates them, and shows you the most common code paths of your program. This highlights areas you could optimize to help increase both the performance of your code and increase user satisfaction, as well as drive down costs.

Profiling depends on Sentry’s Tracing product being enabled beforehand. To enable tracing in the SDK:

In AndroidManifest.xml:

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<application>
    <meta-data
    android:name="io.sentry.dsn"
    android:value="https://examplePublicKey@o0.ingest.sentry.io/0"
  />
    <meta-data
    android:name="io.sentry.traces.sample-rate"
    android:value="1.0"
  />
</application>

Check out the tracing setup documentation for more detailed information on how to configure sampling. Setting the sample rate to 1.0 means all transactions will be captured.

By default, some transactions will be created automatically for common operations like loading a view controller/activity and app startup.

Android profiling is available starting in SDK version 6.16.0 and is supported on API level 22 and up. App start profiling is available starting in SDK version 7.3.0.

In AndroidManifest.xml:

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<application>
    <meta-data
    android:name="io.sentry.dsn"
    android:value="https://examplePublicKey@o0.ingest.sentry.io/0"
  />
    <meta-data
    android:name="io.sentry.traces.sample-rate"
    android:value="1.0"
  />
    <meta-data
    android:name="io.sentry.traces.profiling.sample-rate"
    android:value="1.0"
  />
    <meta-data
    android:name="io.sentry.traces.profiling.enable-app-start"
    android:value="true"
  />
</application>

The io.sentry.traces.profiling.sample-rate setting is relative to the io.sentry.traces.sample-rate setting.

When app start profiling is enabled, the whole app start process is profiled. This includes all methods from any ContentProvider, the Application class, and the first Activity, until the first automatic Activity transaction is finished. App start profiling can be enabled with the manifest option io.sentry.traces.profiling.enable-app-start as shown above, and it will respect the io.sentry.traces.sample-rate and the io.sentry.traces.profiling.sample-rate. If you prefer to use a sampling function, the SDK sets the isForNextAppStart field on the TransactionContext to specify it will be used for the next app start profiling.

The SDK won't run app start profiling the very first time the app runs, as the SDK won't have read the options by the time the profile should run. The SDK will set the isForNextAppStart flag in TransactionContext if app start profiling is enabled.

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