Android Build Speed Tools

Best Practices

• Ensure that the workstation is not being used while running any benchmarks. This helps increase the reproducibility of these benchmarks.
• Avoid making code edits while a benchmark is running, since it may break in-progress builds.

Tool: benchmark.py

This script can be used to measure several benchmarks for build speed. Simply run tools/android/build_speed/benchmark.py -h to see example input/output and a list of available benchmarks and suites.

Suites are a collection of benchmarks and can be passed by name the same way as any individual benchmark. This is convenient if you want to run a set of benchmarks one after the other. e.g. the all_incremental suite runs all incremental benchmarks in serial.

Since most benchmarks require the full capacity and parallelism of the workstation, there is no option to run benchmarks in parallel.

This tool will modify certain source files in your current src repository during benchmarks. It will attempt to restore those files to their original content after completing all benchmarks.

Future plans

• Add a script to compare benchmarks between two revisions.
• Add options to allow ninja tracing files to be stored and examined for each benchmark.
• Separate out time used by ninja versus time used by build steps.