Help with high ANR rate

ilusha

Hi there.

I recently released a game and it has a high ANR rating (2.5%).
The project uses: Starling, FeathersUI, Spine, obfuscation with kindi, sounds. A number of extensions are connected: admob, in-app-billing, display cutouts detection and some others.

Most of the ANR is the same as in this issue: https://github.com/airsdk/Adobe-Runtime-Support/issues/1319

And in this regard, I have a question for the community. Does anyone have any game projects which do not have the problem of high ANR? Does anyone have any experience with reducing ANR to the level allowed by android (0.47%) if it was high originally? Maybe there is a particularly stable version of AIR where these ANRs do not show up? Are there any workarounds or game implementation specifics to look out for?

We all use plus or minus the same libraries and extensions. So if there is no ANR problem in some cases, it is probably possible to achieve the correct behaviour for problematic projects as well.

Of the ideas I'm going to try:
-Total disabling of all extensions
-Disable sound (several times I noticed on the desktop, that at the time of playing sounds game may freeze for a couple of seconds, on mobile never saw this).
-Additional optimization of the game. The problem is that on the available devices the game runs stably and ANRs are not reproduced.

I would be grateful for any advice or help.
Thank you.

Shaun_Max

Ok! this what I can see on my console : -

But this is of an app, that has not been updated for almost a year. Unfortunately our latest apps, don't have enough data for ANR.

ilusha

Shaun_Max This is very high ANR rate. Do you see decrease in the app discovery?

Hey guys, doesn't anyone have good statistics on ANR in your projects?

Shaun_Max

ilusha Do you see decrease in the app discovery?

Like I said, we have not updated this app for almost a year. Our daily install rates were low, from the beginning, ~ 5 / day

2dguy

One of my apps (with 15k users, 200 install a day) has an ANR rate of .82% and a Crash Rate of 0.08%. But the only extension used is an audio extension. Planning on adding ads, iap, etc, down the road.

Shaun_Max

2dguy which sdk version?

ilusha

2dguy Thank you. Have you tried to improve the ANR rate or just ignored it?

bontegames

I have very good results with AIR 33.1.1.575.
My most popular game (around 2K downloads a day) has an ANR rate of 0.08% and a crash rate of 0.02%
I'm using distriqt Ad and Inapp ANEs and there is sound and music in the game.

ilusha

bontegames Thank you for the information. This is very encouraging. Have you always had such a good rate or did you do some optimization?
Also, could you describe the game a little bit. Is there complex calculations or a lot of data loading? Are there a lot of sprites and different animations?

Shaun_Max

2dguy v33.1.1.300.

thats too old ? how do you maintain such low ANR rate even now? is that an app that just displays "Hello World" ? 😆

bontegames My most popular game (around 2K downloads a day) has an ANR rate of 0.08% and a crash rate of 0.02%

intriguing!

2dguy

ilusha Just basically ignoring it for now. Not going to touch anything until we start adding the next phase.
@Shaun_Max v33.1.1.300.

bontegames

ilusha The main optimizations I did was making sure absolutely nothing is executed when the game is deactivated, so no calculations and stopping all sound.
I just went over all my games and they are into that same range (I have games with lots of vector art on the one hand and on the other hand also games games with pixelart and lots of calculations). I noticed one game with a higher percentage, and I saw I forget to stop the sound for that one (and only zeroed the volume) when deactivated.

2dguy

Shaun_Max lol.. 😛 but it doesn't use Starling, it uses a custom game engine and Genome2D for rendering.

ma

Yeah our rates are about that too, one of our biggest client apps has 0.16 ANR and 0.05 crash. But yeah we use an ane for all sounds and music, once we did that a few years ago that dropped our rates considerably.

Shaun_Max

ma But yeah we use an ane for all sounds and music, once we did that a few years ago that dropped our rates considerably.

so are you saying it could be ANEs ?

ilusha

ma What version of the AIR SDK is used for those apps?

Shaun_Max

2dguy what could be wrong with our build?
@ilusha Please let me also know the cause if you find any!

ma

Shaun_Max No, sound playback was our biggest contributor to ANRs and when we changed to using an ANE instead of the Sound class our ANRs dropped significantly.

Shaun_Max

ma How did you identify that ?
in our case this issue is the top scorer : -

Input dispatching timed out (2a798be air.com.company.appname/air.com.company.appname.AppEntry (server) is not responding. Waited 10001ms for MotionEvent)

I can also see this :

is crashalytics causing this issue?
Any help ?

ma

Doubt it. Best if you can get the full report and ask Harman on github about it.

Shaun_Max

@ilusha Have you already reported any issue to Harman?

ilusha

Shaun_Max Yes, you can find some answers from Harman here: https://github.com/airsdk/Adobe-Runtime-Support/issues/1319

Right now we found that parsing of our game data takes more than 5 seconds on some old devices. But user needs to touch a screen like a crazy to see an ANR. So I don't thing that it matters.

We use an obfuscated swf. So maybe it has some effect. I'll let you know if I find anything.

Shaun_Max

bontegames what about a simple loading animation ...

private function onStageDeactivate(e:flash.events.Event):void {
        deactivated = true;
        star.stop(true);

        if (myRoot != null && myRoot.current_state != null) {
            myRoot.current_state.pause(); // pauses all sounds
            myRoot.showBlackScreen(); // displays a black screen with circulating loading animation
        } 

        pausedTime = flash.utils.getTimer();
    }