When setting Profile GPU rendering developer feature to "On screen as bars" I used to see bars with blue, purple, red, and orange colors on Android Lollipop as described here.
But on Android Marshmallow these bars consist of seven different colors: dark green, medium green, light green, blue, light blue, red, and orange.
I didn't manage to find any information relating these colors on Android Developers. So what do these new colors mean?
Unfortunately there isn't an official documentation yet, but in this Google+ post a bunch of Googlers suggest a blog post that is "really well written and details the changes".
Quoting relevant part from http://blog.udinic.com/2015/09/15/speed-up-your-app:
In Marshmallow, more colors were added to indicate more steps, such as Measure/Layout, input handling and others:
EDIT 09/29/2015: John Reck, a framework engineer in Google, has added this information about some of the new colors:
The exact definition of “animation” is everything that’s registered with Choreographer as CALLBACK_ANIMATION. This includes Choreographer#postFrameCallback and View#postOnAnimation which are what’s used by view.animate(), ObjectAnimator, Transitions, etc… And yup, it’s the same thing systrace labels as “animation”.
“misc” is the delay between the vsync’s timestamp and the current timestamp when it was received. If you’ve ever seen logs from Choreographer about “Missed vsync by blabla ms skipping blabla frames”, that now shows up as “misc”. This is the difference between INTENDED_VSYNC and VSYNC in the framestats dump (https://developer.android.com/preview/testing/performance.html#timing-info)
I think the next links of Google should help:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzYkVL1n4M8 https://developer.android.com/topic/performance/rendering/profile-gpu.html https://developer.android.com/studio/profile/dev-options-rendering.html
The colors mean different things based on the Android version you have.
Android 6.0 and above:
Android versions 4.x - 5.x :
