Wentong Li, MoE Engineering Research Center of Software/Hardware Co-Design Technology and Application, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China; and School of Computer Science and Technology, East China Normal University; Li-Pin Chang, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan; Yu Mao, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong; and MBZUAI, Abu Dhabi; Liang Shi, MoE Engineering Research Center of Software/Hardware Co-Design Technology and Application, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China; and School of Computer Science and Technology, East China Normal University
Mobile applications exhibit increasingly high memory demands, making efficient memory management critical for enabling fast and responsive user experiences. However, our analysis of Android systems reveals inefficiencies in the current kernel-level memory reclaim design, which struggles to meet the performance demands of modern apps and fails to exploit upgraded storage devices. To address this challenge, we propose PMR, a parallel memory reclaim scheme. PMR introduces two key techniques: proactive page shrinking (PPS) and storage-friendly page writeback (SPW). PPS enhances the memory reclaim process by decoupling the time-consuming steps of page shrinking and page writeback for parallel execution, while SPW optimizes write I/O operations through batched unmapping of victim pages for bulk, efficient writeback. Experimental results on real-world mobile devices demonstrate that PMR can improve application response times by up to 43.6% compared to the original Android memory reclaim approach.
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