More Apps, Faster Hot-Launch on Mobile Devices via Fore/Background-aware GC-Swap Co-design
Abstract: Faster app launching is crucial for the user experience on mobile devices. Apps launched from a background cached state, called hot-launching, have much better performance than apps launched from scratch. To increase the number of hot-launches, leading mobile vendors now cache more apps in the background by enabling swap. Recent work also proposed reducing the Java heap to increase the number of cached apps. However, this paper found that existing methods deteriorate app hot-launch performance while increasing the number of cached apps. To simultaneously improve the number of cached apps and hot-launch performance, this paper proposes Fleet, a foreground/background-aware GC-swap co-design framework. To enhance app-caching capacity, Fleet limits the tracing range of GC to background objects only, avoiding touching long-lifetime foreground objects. To improve hot-launch performance, Fleet identifies objects that will be accessed during the next hot-launch and uses runtime information to guide the swap scheme in the OS. In addition, Fleet aggregates small objects with similar access patterns into the same pages to improve swap efficiency. We implemented Fleet in AOSP and evaluated its performance with different types of apps. Experimental results show that Fleet achieves a 1.59× faster hot-launch time and caches 1.21× more apps than Android.
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