An Empirical Study of Software Aging Manifestations in Android

Abstract

Software aging phenomenon has been widely observed in Android mobile operating system, which will make a great influence on people's life. In this paper we present an empirical study on the manifestations of aging-related bugs in Android operating system. By conducting a set of experiments through building various aging conditions in Android, we clarify the fact that the aging-related bugs injected in Android are with several manifestation patterns from two angles of view (Users' and System's viewpoints), depending on their location (Dalvik Heap or Native Heap), process priorities (cached, persistent, background, foreground and etc.). To show the new features of software aging in Android, the differences of software aging manifestations between Android and Linux are further explored in this work.