There are good chances that, at a point, your app is connected and talk to a backend. Having best network performances is crucial, maybe as important as the responsiveness of the UI. Instruments provides good built-in tools for analysing memory, cpu, leaks, fps but analysing an app network performances is not easy.
There are a lot of different methods here and here for instance to inspect how behave your app, and for the most part the presented solution is to enable a HTTP proxy on the iPhone Wi-Fi interface and capture Wi-Fi packets. There is also an Apple Technical Q&A here that describes in details how to capture packets, but I’m going to present a method that can also works when you want to analyse your app on a 3G/Edge connection, or if you can’t have a proxy on the Wi-Fi connection.
Create a remote virtual interface (RVI) on your iPhone
Capture packets using tcpdump in a .pcap file
Using HAR (HTTP Archive) file format
Instruments network profiling
- Create a remote virtual interface (RVI) on your iPhone
Really easy, just plug your iPhone to your Mac via USB and type in a terminal
rvictl -s abcdef01234563e91f1f2f8a8cb0841d2dafeebbc
where abcdef01234563e91f1f2f8a8cb0841d2dafeebbc is the UDID of your iPhone. You whould see
$ Starting device abcdef01234563e91f1f2f8a8cb0841d2dafeebbc [SUCCEEDED]
You can check that you have a new network interface
ifconfig -l
will give you
$ lo0 gif0 stf0 en0 en1 p2p0 fw0 rvi0
where rvi0 is the new remote virtual interface. When you’ll be done, you will be able to delete the RVI
rvictl -x abcdef01234563e91f1f2f8a8cb0841d2dafeebbc
will ouput
$ Stopping device 74bd53c647548234ddcef0ee3abee616005051ed [SUCCEEDED]
- Capture packets using tcpdump in a .pcap file
After having instanciate a RVI, type in a terminal
sudo tcpdump -i rv0 -n -s 0 -w dumpFile.pcap tcp
This will start the capture of TCP packets on the remote interface
-i rv0 causes tcpdump to capture on the RVI-n option means that addresses are not converted to domain names (which is faster)-s 0 option causes tcpdump to capture the entire packet and not just the first bytes-w dumpFile.pcp option specifies the output file, in libpcap file format.
tcp option to capture only TCP packets.
On the device, launch your app, play with it and once you’ve finished, quit tcpdump. At this point, you can also close your remove virtual interface
rvictl -x abcdef01234563e91f1f2f8a8cb0841d2dafeebbc
Once we have this pcap file, there is still some work in order to load this file in our favorite analyser tool. The TCP packets have been captured in RAW format and most of the tools work only on Ethernet captured packed. To convert this pcap file, you will need to install tcpreplay (with Homebrew for instance)
brew install tcpreplay
tcprewrite is a part of tcpreplay suite and can be used to convert your raw packets capture to Ethernet packets capture
tcprewrite --dlt=enet --enet-dmac=00:11:22:33:44:55 --enet-smac=66:77:88:99:AA:BB --infile=dumpFile.pcap --outfile=dumpFileFinal.pcap
Now, your packet is ready to be analysed via your favorite tool, like Charles HTTP Proxy or Wireshark.
- Using HAR (HTTP Archive) file format
HTTP Archive (HAR) is an open file format for archiving HTTP packets. The really good news is that there is a lot of tools (often free) available to analyse, visualize HAR files. For instance, provided you have a HAR captured file, you can preview it online with the HAR Viewer
HAR viewer result
You can convert the .pcap captured file to HAR with a Python script, pcap2har. pcap2har depends on the dpkt packet-parsing library (http://code.google.com/p/dpkt/) so we need to install it first. Download the dpkt latest version tar.gz, untar it on your disk, go to the dpkt-1.7 directory and type
sudo python setup.py install
to install dpkt in your Python 2 package library.
Now, clone the lastest pcap2har version at https://github.com/andrewf/pcap2har on your disk. Then, to convert your .pcap file to HAR
./main.py dumpFileFinal.cap dumpFileFinal.har
Be sure to convert the .pcap file that has been rewrite with tcprewrite, otherwise the conversion will fail.
- Instruments network profiling
If you have the source code of the application, you can try to profile it with Instruments ( Xcode > Product > Profile then choose Network template).
Instrument network template
I’ve played a little with the network activities, but I find it hard to extract useful informations for analysing. Let’s hope Apple will improve the tool to profile network activities and bring it to the same level as the Instrument OpenGL template for instance.
http://blog.manbolo.com/2013/02/22/analysing-ios-app-network-performances-on-cellularwifi