About Instruments

Instruments is a performance-analysis and testing tool for dynamically tracing and profiling OS X and iOS code. It is a flexible and powerful tool that lets you track a process, collect data, and examine the collected data. In this way, Instruments helps you understand the behavior of both user apps and the operating system.

At a Glance

With Instruments, you use special tools (known as instruments) to trace different aspects of a process’s behavior. You can also use the tool to record a sequence of user interface actions in OS X and replay them over and over again to replicate a set of steps, while using one or more instruments to gather data.

Instruments provides the ability to:

• Examine the behavior of one or more processes

• Record a sequence of OS X user actions and replay them, reliably reproducing those events and collecting data over multiple runs

• Profile apps in OS X and in iOS (in iPhone or iPad Simulator, or on a physical iOS device)

• Create your own custom DTrace instruments to analyze aspects of system and app behavior

• Save user interface recordings and instrument configurations as templates

Using Instruments, you can perform tasks such as:

• Track down difficult-to-reproduce problems in your code

• Do performance analysis on your app

• Find memory leaks and other problems in your app

• Automate testing of your app

• Stress-test parts of your app

• Perform general system-level troubleshooting

• Gain a deeper understanding of how your app works

Instruments is available with Xcode 3.0 and later and with OS X v10.5 and later.