perfetto

Perfetto is an open-source system-wide tracing framework developed by Google for performance analysis on Android and Linux-based platforms. It provides a unified instrumentation and data pipeline for capturing events across the system, including kernel, driver, and user-space processes, as well as graphics and I/O events. Perfetto is used to investigate performance, latency, and resource usage in Chrome, Android, and other projects.

Perfetto consists of a daemon that runs on the device, a client library and command-line tool, a trace processor that analyzes traces via a SQL-like query language, and a web-based user interface (Perfetto UI) for visualization.

Traces are captured according to a trace configuration that selects data sources (providers) such as ftrace, atrace, perf events, and custom instrumentation. The collected data is stored in Perfetto's native trace format, a protocol-buffer-based structure. The trace processor can read this format and support SQL queries to filter and aggregate data; it can also export to other formats.

Users collect traces by configuring buffers and providers, starting the perfetto process, then stopping and saving the trace. Traces can be analyzed locally with the Perfetto UI or via the trace processor; there are also integrations with Android Studio, Chrome tracing, and other tooling.

Perfetto is widely adopted in Android and Chrome projects as the standard framework for system-wide tracing; it aims to provide low overhead, reproducible tracing and a flexible query-based analysis workflow.