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Using Xcode Instruments to Improve App Performance
Dive into the available Instruments and start improving your app
Xcode Instruments is a developer tool that comes for free with Xcode. It has a lot of useful tools to inspect and improve your app. Although it has a lot to offer, it’s often an area that is a bit less-known.
The better this part is in your app, the better your app performs.
In this blog post, I’ll show you how I’ve improved the performance in a crucial part of the Collect by WeTransfer app, using Xcode Instruments.
To give you an idea of the results, this is the before and after outcome where the part after “Importing photos” has been drastically improved:
As you can see, the importing popup shows way longer in the old version, while the final share sheet is being delayed a lot as well.
Time to dive in and see how we improved this flow!
What Is Xcode Instruments?
Xcode Instruments is best described as a powerful and flexible performance-analysis and testing tool. It’s part of the Xcode toolset, which also includes tools like Create ML and the Accessibility Inspector.
The instruments can be used to:
- Track down problems in your source code.
- Analyze the performance of your app.
- Find memory problems.
And a lot more!
How Can I Access Xcode Instruments?
You can access the Instruments by using Product ➔ Profile from the Xcode menu, for which the shortcut handle is ⌘ + I. This will rebuild your product and opens the Xcode Instruments overview.
