Build timings (iOS)

Requires Bugsee iOS SDK 6.1.5 or newer

Build-timings capture ships with the BugseeAgent post-action in 6.1.5+. It is on by default — the agent reads Xcode's .xcactivitylog after each Archive and uploads a categorized summary plus an optional detail blob with every build.

What gets captured

After the build finishes, the agent locates the Archive's .xcactivitylog (the structured log Xcode writes for every build), decodes it, and records every build section as a span. For each section it captures:

• The section title (CompileSwiftSources, Ld …, CompileAssetCatalog, ProcessProductPackaging, …).
• The start and end timestamps as monotonic offsets from build start.
• The category assigned by the per-section classifier. The wire shape is identical to the Android Gradle plugin's, so the backend and dashboard render both platforms from a single schema. Five buckets, with iOS semantics:
  • managed_code — never emitted on iOS. Reserved for JVM-bytecode pipelines (kotlinc / javac / R8 / desugar) on Android. Everything iOS compiles is native code.
  • native — Swift, Obj-C, C and C++ compile units, plus Swift module planning / emission and clang module building. Dominates almost every iOS build. (On Android this same bucket holds JNI / C++ compiled via CMake / NDK.)
  • resources — asset catalogs, storyboards, xibs, strings, plist processing, resource copies.
  • packaging — linking, code signing, framework embedding, strip, touch, dSYM generation, and Swift standard-library embedding ("get the runtime into the bundle").
  • other — build-graph dependency computation, tool-version discovery, auxiliary file generation, and Swift Package Manager resolution steps. Typically under 1% on a simple app, but SPM-heavy projects push it higher as Computing package information, Copying Package.resolved, and Resolve Package Graph all land here.

Container/wrapper sections are filtered out first so they don't double-count their children; among the remaining sections precedence is native → resources → packaging, first match wins.

What gets uploaded

Every build POST carries an inline build_metadata.timings summary regardless of detail-blob status. The summary is small (under 1 KiB) and renders the dashboard's chip strip directly:

{
  "managed_code_ms": 0,
  "native_ms": 41280,
  "resources_ms": 5120,
  "packaging_ms": 7360,
  "other_ms": 1840,
  "total_ms": 52310,
  "top_tasks": [
    { "name": "CompileSwiftSources", "duration_ms": 28400 },
    { "name": "Ld MyApp normal arm64", "duration_ms": 5200 },
    { "name": "CompileAssetCatalog Assets.xcassets", "duration_ms": 3100 }
  ]
}

total_ms is the wall-clock span of the build (max-end minus min-start), not the arithmetic sum of per-section durations — Xcode runs sections in parallel and they overlap. On a typical iOS build managed_code_ms is 0 and native_ms carries the bulk of the time.

The detail blob is a separately gzipped JSON shipped to a dedicated presigned PUT URL (timings_upload_endpoint) when timings are enabled:

{
  "schema_version": 1,
  "build_started_at_ms": 1747145400000,
  "wall_clock_ms": 52310,
  "tasks": [
    {
      "path": "CompileSwiftSources",
      "category": "native",
      "start_ms": 1840,
      "end_ms": 30240
    },
    {
      "path": "Ld MyApp normal arm64",
      "category": "packaging",
      "start_ms": 44900,
      "end_ms": 50100
    }
  ]
}

Offsets are relative to build_started_at_ms (millis since epoch), keeping the per-section entries compact. The blob is bounded — when a build has very many sections, the slowest entries are retained so the waterfall stays representative.

Configuration

Timings are on by default. The only knob is a single environment variable, set on the scheme's Archive action or exported in CI:

# Opt out — keeps the rest of build-info, drops only timings:
export BUGSEE_BUILD_INFO_TIMINGS_ENABLED=0

This mirrors the Android Gradle plugin's bugsee.buildInfo.timings.enabled DSL flag. Disable it on privacy-sensitive builds where you don't want target / section names leaving the machine — the rest of the build record (version, VCS, size, dependencies) still uploads. See Where to set the env vars for the three placement options.

If the agent can't find a usable .xcactivitylog (for example, a clean build with logging suppressed), it simply omits the timings block — the build still registers.

What you see in the dashboard

The build detail page's Timings tab is rendered when the build record has timings_status == 'ready'. Three sections, top to bottom:

Stat chip strip

One chip for Total (wall-clock), then one per category with a colored swatch. Each chip is labelled with the absolute duration (52.3 s) and, when a previous build is available, a delta from that build (+0.4 s or −1.2 s). The managed_code chip is omitted on iOS builds since the bucket is always zero.

Regression summary

A second strip — visible only when a previous build is available — summarising the diff:

• Total delta — wall-clock change vs the previous build.
• Regressed — count of sections that got slower by more than the noise floor.
• Improved — count of sections that got faster by more than the noise floor.

This lets you spot single-commit timing regressions without scanning the waterfall.

Gantt waterfall

When the detail blob is present, the tab renders a per-section Gantt waterfall — sections plotted on a horizontal time axis with category-colored bars. Parallel sections share rows so the visualisation captures Xcode's actual execution shape, not a stacked total.

When the detail blob is absent (timings disabled, build still uploading, or worker job not yet complete), the waterfall is replaced by a stacked-bar fallback derived from the inline summary — still useful, but lacks per-section drill-down.

Worker pipeline

A successful upload triggers the timings-processing job on the Bugsee worker. The job validates the schema, re-uploads the same gzipped bytes to the customer's per-build S3 prefix, computes a diff vs the previous build (matching section titles only), and marks timings_status='ready' on the build record.

Failure paths (oversize blob, schema mismatch, S3 transient errors) mark timings_status='failed' and surface a "Timings unavailable" state on the dashboard rather than hanging the rest of the build pipeline.