Efficient memory reclaiming for mitigating sluggish response in mobile devices

Abstract

Mobile devices based on flash memory have unique hardware characteristics. They have different memory management mechanisms such as no memory swapping and app cache. Android platform adopts new modules such as low memory killer (LMK), activity manager service (AMS) besides kswapd and out of memory killer (OOMK). However, these modules generate many Kernel function calls that incur sluggish responses and inefficient app cache utilization, which reduces the chances of fast app re-launching. Thus, we propose an efficient memory management module called memory orchestration system (MOS) using dynamic page cache size and killed application counts. According to the experiments with 26 applications, it reduced the number of function calls by 84%. In addition, MOS keeps efficiently the app cache compared to the original Android system by 34.1%.