Performance Analysis: Analyzing performance in Flutter and Handling Jank
Article Summary
Pinhome's engineering team tackled the silent killer of mobile apps: jank. Their Flutter app was stuttering under load, and users were noticing.
The team at Pinhome documented their approach to diagnosing and eliminating performance issues in Flutter applications. They focused on frame rendering problems that cause visible UI stutters, especially during animations with heavy background processing.
Key Takeaways
- Flutter's single-threaded rendering causes jank when heavy tasks block the UI thread
- Isolates enable parallel processing without shared memory, preventing UI freezes
- Target under 16ms per frame for smooth 60fps performance
- Flutter DevTools provides CPU profiling, memory analysis, and timeline views
- The compute function simplifies running heavy calculations in separate isolates
Critical Insight
Moving CPU-intensive work to isolates keeps Flutter's main thread free for rendering, eliminating the stutters that frustrate users.
