Sparrow: Flexible Memory Deduplication in Android Systems with Similar-Page Awareness

Mobile devices have become ubiquitous in daily life. In contrast to traditional servers, mobile devices suffer from limited memory resources, leading to a significant degradation in the user experience. This paper demonstrates that the primary cause of memory consumption lies in anonymous pages associated with application heaps. Existing schemes are ineffective in deduplicating these pages due to the limited occurrence of the same anonymous pages. This paper presents Sparrow, a similar-page aware deduplication solution for mobile systems. Sparrow shows that memory pages still have the potential to deduplicate, even though the same pages are rare. An interesting observation inspires this, that is, a high number of pages having the partially-same contents. We have implemented Sparrow on real-life smartphones. Experimental results indicate that 30.45% more space can be saved with Sparrow.