Improving choice of processes to terminate in Android OS

Android operating system, which is the most popular platform for smartphones and tablet computers, has an original memory managing system, which is call “low memory killer”. In case of lacking of memory, Android operating system terminates processes until enough memory is available. It selects targets in order of pre-defined priority and consuming memory size regardless of its re-launching time, its frequency of use, and whether it is recently used. Thus, this termination sometimes harms user convenience. In this paper, we propose two new policies on selection of processes to terminate. One is based on LRU and the other is based on application re-launching time. Then, we show our evaluation results and demonstrate that the proposed methods can improve process launching time.