What is EGL and GL mtrack in Android Memory Dump

Question

I'm currently working on a hybrid application that is exhibiting some peculiar memory usage that I'm trying to debug. As soon as the application starts, it appears to be immediately using close to 250MB of memory, which seems excessively given that all we have loaded at that point is the login screen. I've been looking at a few memory profiling tools for Android (the Xamarin profiler and the android profiler shipped with the SDK), but all of them show relatively low heap usage (~10-15MB, which I'm trying to get down). I ran "adb shell dumpsys meminfo APPNAME -d' and got the following trace:

** MEMINFO in pid 24925 [APPNAME] **
                   Pss  Private  Private  Swapped     Heap     Heap     Heap
                 Total    Dirty    Clean    Dirty     Size    Alloc     Free
                ------   ------   ------   ------   ------   ------   ------
  Native Heap    19439    19396        0        0    28672    22915     5756
  Dalvik Heap    15441    14992        0        0    37319    36837      482
 Dalvik Other      542      368        0        0                           
        Stack      432      432        0        0                           
       Ashmem    17388    16508      880        0                           
      Gfx dev    40538    34504        0        0                           
    Other dev        4        0        4        0                           
     .so mmap     6211      224     3080        0                           
    .apk mmap    10531        0    10232        0                           
    .ttf mmap      453        0      260        0                           
    .dex mmap     1263        0      980        0                           
    .oat mmap      635        0      152        0                           
    .art mmap      707      516       24        0                           
   Other mmap      452        4       52        0                           
   EGL mtrack    63508    63508        0        0                           
    GL mtrack    79116    79116        0        0                           
      Unknown    21756    21756        0        0                           
        TOTAL   278416   251324    15664        0    65991    59752     6238

I've been trying to understand what this means by using the documentation provided at: https://developer.android.com/tools/debugging/debugging-memory.html, but that page doesn't seem to have any info on the biggest culprits: Gfx dev, EGL mtrack, GL mtrack, and Unknown. Is there some documentation on what these categories are or why they would grow to be so big?

Thanks

Answer 1

EGL and GL shows here memory consumed by Graphics layer basically. I am sure you are running adb shell dumpsys meminfo command on Android lollipop device. Actually dumpsys meminfo tool/command has been modified in lollipop to calculate and display graphics memory.

In old version (KitKat or older) you can not find EGL and GL information although graphics consumed memory in KitKat or older versions also.

This is we can request Google to update their documentation to explain new memory components also. In short you can say it is bug in documentation of Android. They should update it as per latest implementation of adb shell dumpsys meminfo tool/command.

References:

EGL - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EGL_(API)

GL - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL

Answer 2

GL mtrack is driver-reported GL memory usage. It's primarily the sum of GL texture sizes, GL command buffers, fixed global driver RAM overheads, etc.

EGL mtrack is gralloc memory usage. It's primarily the sum of the SurfaceView/TextureView.