Reducing Smartphone Application Delay through Read/Write Isolation

The smartphone has become an important part of our daily lives. However, the user experience is still far from being optimal. In particular, despite the rapid hardware upgrades, current smartphones often suffer various unpredictable delays during operation, e.g., when launching an app, leading to poor user experience. In this paper, we investigate the behavior of reads and writes in smartphones. We conduct the first large-scale measurement study on the Android I/O delay using the data collected from our Android application running on 2611 devices within nine months. Among other factors, we observe that reads experience up to 626% slowdown when blocked by concurrent writes for certain workloads. Additionally, we show the asymmetry of the slowdown of one I/O type due to another, and elaborate the speedup of concurrent I/Os over serial ones. We use this obtained knowledge to design and implement a system prototype called SmartIO that reduces the application delay by prioritizing reads o...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: MOBISYS
• Authors: David T. Nguyen, Gang Zhou, Guoliang Xing, Xin Qi, Zijiang Hao, Ge Peng, Qing Yang
• Keywords: Computer Networks, MOBISYS 2015