SmartSwap: High-performance and user experience friendly swapping in mobile systems

With high-performance mobile processors and large main memory, smartphones are now integrated with more applications and richer functionality than ever. This poses larger memory and storage space demands, however, most mobile systems have limited memory space, which in turn affects user satisfaction. For example, application response time could become longer due to limited memory capacity. Swapping is an effective way to extend memory capacity, but often lead to poor performance in smartphones. In this paper, we propose predictive process-level swapping that predicts the most rarely used (MRU) applications and dynamically swaps processes ahead-of-time. Trace-based evaluations show up to 30% increase in application launch performance compared to the worst case brought by flash-based swap. The system could retains more than 50% processes in the background with energy cost of no more than 0.03% of battery life for each trigger.