Android transactions lasting for days, TTID halfway in, all spans at the very end.

[maxkosty]

Integration

sentry-android

Build System

Gradle

AGP Version

unknown

Proguard

Enabled

Version

7.2.0

Steps to Reproduce

Customer is observing transactions lasting for multiple days where (👉 see linked Jira issue for examples)

About 60-70% of all transactions over 1 hour (about 1% of total transactions) exhibit this pattern:

• 2 days until TTID,
• (sometimes) then another day of no spans
• and finally normal spans at the end culminating in transaction being finished

(this is the main pattern and the one that I we don't have explanation for, there’s also a second, less common, pattern among extra-long transactions where all spans happen early on, except for one long file.read that delays TTID - this is out of scope of this report, please ignore those).

Below is customer's configuration:

Settings set during application oncreate via dagger/anvil DI

override fun configure(options: SentryAndroidOptions) {
        dsnValidator.ensureDsnIsValid(sentryOptions.dsn)
        options.dsn = sentryOptions.dsn
        options.isAttachScreenshot = false
        options.isAnrEnabled = sentryFeatureGates.get().isAnrEnabled()
        options.tracesSampleRate = sentryFeatureGates.get().getTracesSampleRate()
        options.isAttachAnrThreadDump = true
        options.environment = buildInfo.getBuildChannel().name.lowercase()
        options.setBeforeSend { event, _ ->
            tagDecorators.forEach {
                event.setTag(it.key, it.value.get())
            }
            event
        }

        options.addInAppInclude("com.redactedcompanyname")

        // Remove the Timber integration so that we can use our own
        options.integrations.removeIf { it is SentryTimberIntegration }

        if (sentryFeatureGates.get().isFragmentsEnabled()) {
            options.addIntegration(
                FragmentLifecycleIntegration(
                    context.applicationContext as Application,
                    enableFragmentLifecycleBreadcrumbs = true,
                    enableAutoFragmentLifecycleTracing = true,
                ),
            )
            options.isEnableUserInteractionTracing = true
            options.isEnableUserInteractionBreadcrumbs = true
        }

// MANIFEST
    <application>
        <provider
            android:name="io.sentry.android.core.SentryInitProvider"
            android:authorities="${applicationId}.SentryInitProvider"
            tools:node="remove" />

        <provider
            android:name="io.sentry.android.core.SentryPerformanceProvider"
            android:authorities="${applicationId}.SentryPerformanceProvider"
            tools:node="remove" />
    </application>

Gradle Plugin

   includeProguardMapping.set(true)
                includeDependenciesReport.set(true)
                includeNativeSources.set(true)
                includeSourceContext.set(true)

                tracingInstrumentation.enabled.set(true)
                autoInstallation.enabled.set(true)

Expected Result

Transaction start coincides with start timestamp of the first span.

Actual Result

Start timestamp of the first span lags days behind start of transaction.

┆Issue is synchronized with this Jira Improvement by Unito

[maxkosty]

Same customer also experiencing #3145 FWIW

[maxkosty]

@stefanosiano theorized that this could be something related to content providers and also noticed that there are several starting points (and app start transactions) for the app in which it was reported (see linked Jira).