SWAM: Revisiting Swap and OOMK for Improving Application Responsiveness on Mobile Devices

Abstract

Existing memory reclamation policies on mobile devices may be no longer valid because they have negative effects on the response time of running applications. In this paper, we propose SWAM, a new integrated memory management technique that complements the shortcomings of both the swapping and killing mechanism in mobile devices and improves the application responsiveness. SWAM consists of (1) Adaptive Swap that performs swapping adaptively into memory or storage device while managing the swap space dynamically, (2) OOM Cleaner that reclaims shared object pages in the swap space to secure available memory and storage space, and (3) EOOM Killer that terminates processes in the worst case while prioritizing the lowest initialization cost applications as victim processes first. Experimental results demonstrate that SWAM significantly reduces the number of applications killed by OOMK (6.5x lower), and improves application launch time (36% faster) and response time (41% faster), compared to the conventional schemes.