SDK Overhead

Adding new features or dependencies to your app incurs additional costs on resources - CPU time, memory usage, and network bandwidth, among other things. Sentry SDKs are no different. This document adds transparency to the possible overhead that using our SDK can add, and help you find the feature set and configurations that work best for you.

General Approach

The SDK is designed to have minimal to no impact on user experience. To achieve this, we utilize an array of tools to continuously measure and optimize the performance of our implementations.

We also employ various techniques to ensure we don't add strain on the system's resources along the hot path - on Mobile, this very often means that we offload processing steps, I/O, and other things to a background thread, or we postpone processing to a later time if possible.

If you find (for example via local Profiling, or using Sentry to improve the performance of your app) that the SDK does not operate within the guidelines mentioned below, please open an issue on our SDK repo and make sure you provide as much context as you can.

Error Monitoring

During regular operation, error monitoring incurs little to no overhead. Once an error or crash occurs, the user experience is compromised, and any crash handling routines operate under time constraints imposed by the system. This means that these implementations are highly optimized to perform the required work as quickly as possible.

The SDK also provides methods to manually capture events: captureError and captureMessage. These methods perform some complex operations, such as capturing stack trace information, and while they are highly optimized as well, calling them in tight loops should be avoided.

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are collected through automated integrations or by manually adding them. To have them readily available for every event generated by the SDK, they are continuously persisted, and managed in a performant buffer. This shouldn't impact user experience.

Capturing excessive numbers of breadcrumbs (for example, creating breadcrumbs for all log messages) can cause significant performance overhead. To mitigate this, review and adapt your app's usage of breadcrumbs. For example, increase the min-level of log messages that create breadcrumbs from warn to error.

Note that increasing the max number of breadcrumbs does not improve performance and can even have a detrimental effect.

Tracing and Performance Monitoring

As stated in our product docs on the topic, Tracing adds some overhead, but should have minimal impact on the performance of your application. In typical scenarios, the expected overhead is less than 3% of the app's resource utilization.

Profiling

As stated in our product docs on the topic, Profiling adds some overhead, but should have minimal impact on the performance of your application. In typical scenarios, the expected overhead is less than 5% of the app's resource utilization.