Perfetto Files

Perfetto v56.0 is out! This release adds more to the Heap Dump Explorer, a round of UI improvements, easier-to-read multi-machine traces, kernel-assisted stack sampling in traced_perf, and a few new SDK knobs.

🔥 Heap Dump Explorer: flamegraphs & bitmaps

The Heap Dump Explorer now has a built-in flamegraph viewer, so you can jump between the class/object/dominator views and a flamegraph without leaving the page. There's also a new bitmap metadata page for bitmaps captured in Android heap dumps, and a feature flag to control whether the explorer auto-opens on traces with heap-graph data.

Heads up: the explorer's setting ID is now prefixed with com.android, so if you'd saved a setting before you'll need to re-enable it.

Under the hood, Android heap dumps now include process and package metadata, and Trace Processor exposes bitmap metadata via a new table in the standard library. Java soft references are treated as strong during reachability analysis, and the HPROF parser no longer aborts when a sub-record straddles a segment boundary.

🖥️ UI

Selecting a slice now shows a distribution histogram of matching slices, with the selected slice highlighted and a one-click shortcut to a Debug Track.

• Hover previews on screenshot tracks.
• Trace start time and duration in the timeline header.
• A matching-slice action on selection flamegraphs and a scroll-to-root command for top-down/bottom-up/pivot views.
• SQL formatting and per-query column refresh on the Query page.
• Faster rendering for incomplete-slice fetches and quicker trace_processor worker startup.
• Memcg reclaim tracks, now grouped under Memory.
• Details panels and process navigation in the AndroidStartup and AndroidAnr plugins.
• Fixed pinned tracks getting unpinned when the timeline loaded.

🌐 Multi-machine tracing

Traces gathered across machines with traced_relay are easier to attribute:

• TracingServiceState now carries machine_id and machine_name, and perfetto --query / --query-raw show a MACHINE column when more than one machine is involved. Host-only output is unchanged.

• The stats table reports per-machine and per-trace statistics.

  PRODUCER PROCESSES CONNECTED:

  ID PID UID FLAGS MACHINE NAME SDK == === === ===== ======= ==== === 1 0 501 guest-B example_system_wide Perfetto v56.0 2 0 501 guest-A example_system_wide Perfetto v56.0 3 -1 0 (host) example_system_wide Perfetto v56.0

⚡ Kernel-assisted stack sampling

traced_perf can now use in-kernel frame pointer unwinding for faster stack sampling on callstack-heavy workloads.

🦊 Firefox Profiler markers

Markers from the Firefox Profiler now import as slices, so you can line them up against the rest of the trace.

🧰 SDK

• New track_event_buffer_exhausted_policy in TracingInitArgs to decide what happens when the TrackEvent buffer fills up.
• The Java SDK now runs on non-ART JVMs (e.g. on host/desktop).

🐛 Fixes & build

• Process and package metadata added to Android heap dumps.
• Fixed an intermittent service crash from a use-after-free in the lock-free task runner.
• Fixed builds on FreeBSD (tracebox), musl, and recent Fedora.
• Trace Processor: faster startup, hardened parsers and SQL engine.

📚 Docs

• Docs for the new subcommand-based trace_processor CLI and for multi-machine tracing.
• A Data Explorer doc stub, a better architecture doc, and new images/videos.
• Updated heap profiler docs.

Happy Tracing!

A huge thanks to everyone, both inside and outside of Google, who contributed to making Perfetto v56 a success. ♥️

For complete details, see the changelog or view all changes on GitHub.

Download Perfetto v56.0 from our releases page, get started at docs.perfetto.dev, or try the UI directly at ui.perfetto.dev.