Facebook Inc. is trying to make the lives of mobile application developers a little easier with the release of a new open-source performance testing tool.

The tool is called Profilo, which Facebook describes it as a scalable, mobile-first performance tracing library for Android. Explaining the rationale for the tool, the social media giant pointed out that mobile testing, which involves ensuring apps perform as expected across a range of operating systems, bandwidth and other variables, is one of the biggest challenges for app developers.

Facebook’s explanation of how Profilo works is pretty technical, but essentially the tool is designed to manage data streams from mobile applications that can be used to measure various aspects of their performance. The idea is that developers can reconstruct the state of the app during any interaction they’re trying to measure, in order to assess and improve its performance. Furthermore, Profilo also serves as a configuration system for the collection of telemetry data from specific devices.

“Profilo vastly improves the turnaround time on performance regressions by giving us the precision to understand the root cause for regressions as small as tens of milliseconds of CPU time,” Facebook engineer Delyan Kratunov wrote in a blog post.

Another unique capability of Profilo — and this gets more technical yet — is its “Java stack unwinder,” which can comprehend virtual machine structures and collect stack traces without using the official Java APIs, thereby overcoming issues around suspension-based stack unwinding.

Profilo is the latest in a series of open-source tools Facebook has released that are mostly aimed at developers. Some of the company’s notable open-source projects of late include the Open/R networking development platform, which it uses to build new network applications and functions whenever it needs to expand them.

Facebook also recently unveiled a second application performance related tool called RacerD. That tool was designed to examine software code for issues known as “race conditions,” which can cause apps to behave in abnormal ways, and prevent them from occurring.

Image: Marcin Wichary/Facebook