Reducing the Overhead of Virtual Memory Swapping by Considering Application Characteristics and Memory Situations

As the number of mobile apps continues to increase, the overhead of virtual memory swapping in smartphones is becoming increasingly heavy. Unlike desktop or server systems, the default setting of smartphones does not support swapping, and thus apps are terminated in case there are no available memory space. This is because enabling the swapping function in smartphones accompanies large overhead through storage accesses. In this paper, we present a new swapping policy for smartphones that reduces the overhead of storage accesses significantly. Specifically, our policy considers application characteristics and memory situations to adjust the number of processes to be swapped. To do so, we monitor the current memory situation and determine whether supporting swapping or not for the apps in execution. Measurement studies with Android reference phones through executing 24 popular mobile apps show that the proposed policy reduces the overhead of swapping significantly.