Introducing RheaTrace: An Enhanced Android Performance Tracing Tool

Many Android performance engineers have used Systrace, but it is limited to specific system calls, lacks application‑level timing, and does not provide detailed I/O information.

ByteDance’s open‑source tool /system/bin/atrace (also known as btrace or RheaTrace) builds on Systrace and improves it in three key ways:

Efficiency: automatically injects custom events into app methods at compile time with flexible configuration rules.

Performance: rewrites the real‑time atrace data writing process, achieving up to 400% speed gains.

Usability: provides richer I/O data and a novel solution to ensure trace completeness even when exceptions occur.

IO behavior – RheaTrace captures detailed I/O during app cold‑start. By adding the disk tag to the trace command and opening the resulting trace with Perfetto, developers can see precise I/O operations that Systrace only shows as generic events.

Function timing – Unlike Systrace, RheaTrace displays method‑level durations. Adding a simple Thread.sleep(2000) in a click handler results in a trace entry named haoshiMethod , allowing direct attribution of the delay.

Despite its advantages, RheaTrace has several limitations: it only runs on Python 2.7, does not support Windows, captures traces only from the main process, requires external‑storage permissions, and its output systrace.html must be opened with perfetto rather than directly in a browser.

Overall, RheaTrace offers a much richer performance‑analysis experience than native Systrace, though its setup steps are more involved; future versions are expected to address these shortcomings.