In order to debug and improve your apps, you need to understand which tools are available to you. One of these tools is called Instruments. Instruments is a collection of measurement tools that help you to profile and analyze your app in order to debug and detect complex problems or performance bottlenecks. For example, Instruments can help you figure out if your app is suffering from memory leaks. Tracking a memory leak blindly is tedious and nearly impossible. A good tool such as Instruments helps you track down several possible causes for a memory leak, saving both your time and your sanity.
In this chapter, we're going to look at an app named Instrumental. This app is a very plain app and it's not even close to a real app, but it has some issues. The app is very slow, and the longer it's used and the more the user interacts with the app, the worse the problems seem to get. We're going to use Instruments to measure and analyze this app so we can make improvements where needed and hopefully, we'll end up with a fast app that works well.
This chapter is divided into the following segments:
- Exploring the Instruments suite
- Discovering slow code
- Closing memory leaks
By the end of this chapter, you'll be able to deeply analyze your apps to find potential issues and solve them before they really become a problem. Let's get going, shall we?