Memory Window

Memory Window is available from Tools menu.

Memory window helps you track the total allocated memory of your application. By default, when you select a package, Android Logcat starts periodically requesting memory for your application.

You can change Memory Window behavior from the Tools->Memory Window.

• Auto Capture

  Periodically capture application memory when the package is selected.

• Manual Capture

  Manually capture application memory by clicking Capture button. This is useful if memory requests are affecting your application's performance.

  

• Disabled

  Disables Memory Window and memory requests for your application.

Memory Requests

Memory requests are done using adb shell dumpsys meminfo package_name. You can read more about it here.

Here's an example of memory dump:

Memory Groups

• Resident Set Size (RSS)

  The total used memory of the application which is currently stored in RAM, unlike PSS memory, RSS will include both shared and non-shared memory pages. For example., apps which access the same library will be sharing memory pages.

  Note: This metric is only visible on Android 11 or higher.

• Proportional Set Size (PSS)

  The total used memory of the application which is currently stored in RAM. This is not the total memory which your application has allocated. For example., If you allocate memory from native heap, but don't read or write to such memory (a.k.a make it dirty), it will not appear in PSS memory.

  Note: As mentioned in the google docs, if a memory page is shared between several processes, the size contribution of such page is proportional. For example., if there's 20MB of Graphics memory is shared between two processes, you'll only see 10MB added application's PSS memory.

• Heap Alloc

  The total memory allocated using Dalvik (Java allocators) and native heap allocators. This includes both memory which is in RAM or is paged in the storage. This is the best metric when checking out if your application is leaking Native or Java memory.

• Heap Size

  The total memory which is reserved by your application, this memory size will be always bigger than Heap Alloc size.

Memory Types

General information can be found here.

Here are few examples which memory goes where:

• If you allocate memory using native functions malloc, new or using C# Marshal.AllocHGlobal, such memory will appear in Heap Alloc and Heap Size groups under Native Heap type.
• If you allocate memory using java functions like new, such memory will appear in Heap Alloc and Heap Size groups under Java Heap type.
• In both cases above both native and java memory won't appear in PSS group until you'll try to write or read from allocated native or java memory.
• If you allocate memory using C# new function such memory will appear under PSS group Private Other memory type.

Controls

• You can disable/enable memory types by toggling in the left pane.

• You can select a memory request result by clicking in the right pane.

Note

When memory window is enabled and requesting captures, you might see the following messages on logcat being constantly printed, this is normal:

Explicit concurrent copying GC freed 5515(208KB) AllocSpace objects, 1(20KB) LOS objects, 49% free, 1926KB/3852KB, paused 46us total 11.791ms

Disabling the memory window will stop printing these messages.