Application state aware GC selection optimization in Android

Abstract

Android operating system has a function, called LowMemoryKiller, which forcibly terminates application processes when size of available memory is less than the threshold. On reusing the same application again, re-creation of a process is required and takes longer time. ART (Android Runtime environment) has several GC (Garbage Collection) implementations, and choice of GC has effect on size of processes and behavior of LowMemoryKiller. In this paper, we investigate performance of GC implementations and propose a method for choosing GC implementation depending on application size and state. Then, we show our experimental results and demonstrate that our method reduces the number of process terminations cause by LowMemoryKiller.