ANR in Sentry.initConfigurations due to disk I/O

[vibin]

Integration

sentry-android

Build System

Gradle

AGP Version

7.0.4

Proguard

Enabled

Version

5.7.4

Steps to Reproduce

Initialize SentryAndroid

Expected Result

Expecting to initialize without any ANR

Actual Result

ANR thrown 6660 times for 6455 users in last 7 days:

main (native): tid=1 systid=10537 
#00 pc 0x86b8c libc.so 
#01 pc 0x1b092c libart.so 
#02 pc 0x6743c0 libart.so 
#03 pc 0x6741b0 libart.so 
       at libcore.io.Linux.access(Linux.java)
       at libcore.io.ForwardingOs.access(ForwardingOs.java:72)
       at libcore.io.BlockGuardOs.access(BlockGuardOs.java:73)
       at libcore.io.ForwardingOs.access(ForwardingOs.java:72)
       at android.app.ActivityThread$AndroidOs.access(ActivityThread.java:8485)
       at java.io.UnixFileSystem.checkAccess(UnixFileSystem.java:281)
       at java.io.File.exists(File.java:815)
       at java.io.File.mkdirs(File.java:1349)
       at io.sentry.Sentry.initConfigurations(Sentry.java:222)
       at io.sentry.Sentry.init(Sentry.java:169)
       at io.sentry.Sentry.init(Sentry.java:117)
       at io.sentry.android.core.SentryAndroid.init(SentryAndroid.java:83)
       at io.sentry.android.core.SentryAndroid.init(SentryAndroid.java:64)
       at redacted.core.CrashReporter$Companion.initSentry(CrashReporter.kt:96)
       at redacted.core.CrashReporter$Companion.init(CrashReporter.kt:90)
       at redacted.supply.main.initializer.CrashReporterInitializer.initialize(CrashReporterInitializer.kt:12)
       at redacted.supply.main.initializer.AppInitializers.init(AppInitializers.kt:43)
       at redacted.supply.main.RedactedApplication.onCreate(RedactedApplication.java:98)
       at android.app.Instrumentation.callApplicationOnCreate(Instrumentation.java:1192)
       at android.app.ActivityThread.handleBindApplication(ActivityThread.java:7573)
       at android.app.ActivityThread.access$1400(ActivityThread.java:301)
       at android.app.ActivityThread$H.handleMessage(ActivityThread.java:2166)
       at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:106)
       at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:246)
       at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:8633)
       at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java)
       at com.android.internal.os.RuntimeInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(RuntimeInit.java:602)
       at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:1130)

[adinauer]

Thank you for reporting this @vibin. At the moment there's no easy way to avoid this. We could try and move calls that may cause ANR during init to the background. I can give no timeline for it at this time though.

[vibin]

@adinauer Got it, we will try initing on a background thread

[bruno-garcia]

Some context on why we do I/O:
The SDK by default uses the device file system to store events so we can support offline scenarios.
Additionally, we write a session file to disk so in the event of a crash, on restart we can pick that file up and update the session status to crashed. This affects crash free users and crash free session rate.

[adinauer]

@vibin are you seeing anything the affected 6k users have in common? Like are they maybe all on low end devices?

[vibin]

@adinauer All of them are background process creations, but that could just be because Android never throws ANRs for foreground application start

Yes, the devices are low-end: Galaxy M21 (7%), Galaxy M31 (6%), Galaxy A51 (6%), JioPhone Next (6%)

[adinauer]

Maybe having an option to turn off features requiring IO that can then be turned off only for devices using an old version of Android would solve this. It would however come with the trade off of losing features described by @bruno-garcia further up.

Some context on why we do I/O:
The SDK by default uses the device file system to store events so we can support offline scenarios.
Additionally, we write a session file to disk so in the event of a crash, on restart we can pick that file up and update the session status to crashed. This affects crash free users and crash free session rate.

[adinauer]

@vibin could you please share you SentryAndroid.init code snippet and your manifest file so we can get a feel for what features you're using.

Also are you using any other crash reporting tools?