Characterization of Shared Library Access Patterns of Android Applications

Abstract

We analyze the instruction access patterns of Android applications. Although Android applications are ordinarily written in Java, we find that native-code shared libraries play a large role in their instruction footprint. Specifically, averaging over a wide range of applications, we find that 60% of the instruction pages accessed belong to native-code shared libraries and 72% of the instruction fetches are from these same pages. Moreover, given the extensive use of native-code shared libraries, we find that, for any pair of applications, on average 28% of the overall instruction pages accessed by one of the applications are also accessed by the other. These results suggest the possibility of optimizations targeting shared libraries in order to improve instruction access efficiency and overall performance.