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what you'll learn
it’s been said that “a fast app is great,
but a smooth app is even better.”
if your app isn’t rendering smoothly,
how do you fix it? where do you begin?
this guide shows you where to start,
steps to take, and tools that can help.
info note
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diagnosing performance problems
to diagnose an app with performance problems, you’ll enable
the performance overlay to look at the UI and raster threads.
(the raster thread was previously known as the GPU thread.)
before you begin, you want to make sure that you’re running in
profile mode, and that you’re not using an emulator.
for best results, you might choose the slowest device that
your users might use.
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connect to a physical device
almost all performance debugging for flutter applications
should be conducted on a physical android or iOS device,
with your flutter application running in profile mode.
using debug mode, or running apps on simulators
or emulators, is generally not indicative of the final
behavior of release mode builds.
you should consider checking performance
on the slowest device that your users might reasonably use.
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why you should run on a real device:
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run in profile mode
flutter’s profile mode compiles and launches your application
almost identically to release mode, but with just enough additional
functionality to allow debugging performance problems.
for example, profile mode provides tracing information to the
profiling tools.
info note
DevTools can’t connect to a flutter web app running
in profile mode. use chrome DevTools to
generate timeline events for a web app.
launch the app in profile mode as follows:
in VS code, open your launch.json file, and set the
flutterMode property to profile
(when done profiling, change it back to release or debug):
from the command line, use the --profile flag:
for more information on the different modes,
see flutter’s build modes.
you’ll begin by opening DevTools and viewing
the performance overlay, as discussed in the next section.
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launch DevTools
DevTools provides features like profiling, examining the heap,
displaying code coverage, enabling the performance overlay,
and a step-by-step debugger.
DevTools’ timeline view allows you to investigate the
UI performance of your application on a frame-by-frame basis.
once your app is running in profile mode,
launch DevTools.
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the performance overlay
the performance overlay displays statistics in two graphs
that show where time is being spent in your app. if the UI
is janky (skipping frames), these graphs help you figure out why.
the graphs display on top of your running app, but they aren’t
drawn like a normal widget—the flutter engine itself
paints the overlay and only minimally impacts performance.
each graph represents the last 300 frames for that thread.
this section describes how to enable the performance overlay
and use it to diagnose the cause of jank in your application.
the following screenshot shows the performance overlay running
on the flutter gallery example:
performance overlay showing the raster thread (top),
and UI thread (bottom).the vertical green bars
represent the current frame.
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interpreting the graphs
the top graph (marked “gpu”) shows the time spent by
the raster thread, the bottom one graph shows the time
spent by the UI thread.
the white lines across the graphs show 16ms increments
along the vertical axis; if the graph ever goes over one
of these lines then you are running at less than 60hz.
the horizontal axis represents frames. the graph is
only updated when your application paints,
so if it’s idle the graph stops moving.
the overlay should always be viewed in profile mode,
since debug mode performance is intentionally sacrificed
in exchange for expensive asserts that are intended to aid
development, and thus the results are misleading.
each frame should be created and displayed within 1/60th of
a second (approximately 16ms). a frame exceeding this limit
(in either graph) fails to display, resulting in jank,