AppleTrace

Trace tool for iOS/macOS

AppleTrace is developed for analyzing app's performance on iOS/macOS.

Feature

1. User-defined trace section.
2. [arm64 only] Trace all Objective C methods.

Usage

1. Produce trace data.
2. Copy from app's sandbox directory.
3. Merge (all) trace data files into one file trace.json. (There may be more than 1 trace file.)
4. Generate trace.html based on trace.json.

See below for more detail.

1. Produce

Until now , there are 2 ways for generating trace data.

1. Manual set section.

   Call APTBeginSection at the beginning of method ,and APTEndSection at the end of method. For Objective C method (whether instance method or class method), there are APTBegin and APTEnd macro for easy coding.

   void anyKindsOfMethod{
       APTBeginSection("process");
       // some code
       APTEndSection("process");
   }
   
   - (void)anyObjectiveCMethod{
       APTBegin;
       // some code
       APTEnd;
   }
   

   Sample app is sample/ManualSectionDemo.

2. Dynamic library hooking all objc_msgSend.

   Hooking all objc_msgSend methods (based on HookZz). This only support arm64.

   Sample app is sample/TraceAllMsgDemo.

2. Copy

Using any kinds of method, copy <app's sandbox>/tmp/appletracedata out of Simulator/RealDevice.

3. Merge

Merge/Preprocess the appletracedata.

python merge.py -d <appletracedata directory>

This will produce trace.json in appletracedata directory.

4. Generate

Generate trace.html using catapult.

python catapult/tracing/bin/trace2html appletracedata/trace.json --output=appletracedata/trace.html

open trace.html

SampleData

Open sampledata/trace.html.

Dependencies

1. catapult
2. HookZz

Develop Plan

1. dtrace as data source.