Android CPU Performance Testing Methods

Performance testing is a crucial module for mobile applications, focusing on metrics such as CPU, memory, battery, GPU, FPS, network traffic, and temperature.

CPU performance testing can be performed using three main approaches on Android devices.

1. Using adb shell dumpsys cpuinfo – this command provides per‑PID CPU usage, where the first column is the usage percentage, the second column the PID/package name, and the third column detailed usage. It is easy to use but has high latency; the data may be up to 90 seconds old.

2. Reading /proc/pid/stat – the /proc virtual filesystem exposes kernel data. The /proc/stat file gives overall CPU times (user, nice, system, idle, iowait, irq, softirq) in jiffies. By reading the 14th and 15th fields of /proc/pid/stat (utime and stime) you can compute a process’s CPU time and, with a previous snapshot, calculate the CPU usage percentage. This method may encounter permission‑denied errors and requires sequential reads, which can affect timing consistency.

3. Using the Linux top command – adb shell top displays a table that includes PID, CPU %, VSS, RSS, etc. Common options are -m (number of processes), -n (refresh count), -d (interval), and -s (sort column). Because the column order can vary across devices, you should first run top -b -n 1 to detect the column containing CPU % and then parse that column. The command returns CPU usage for each process; to obtain the total usage of an app you must sum the values of all its processes, which can be identified by the shared UID assigned to the app.

By periodically executing the chosen method and aggregating the results, you can obtain reliable CPU performance metrics for Android applications.

Author : Hong Zhiyuan, Senior Test Development Engineer at Baidu Platform Testing Department, creator of SmartMonkey, Android hybrid script testing service, and Android test script recording tool.

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