iRAM: Sensing memory needs of my smartphone

Our study reveals that facilitating warm launch of just five smartphone applications is extremely expensive, using up to 36 percent of memory. Further investigation of 20 popular applications indicates that rich multimedia applications have high heap usage and go above allowed boundaries, up to 5.63 times more heap than guaranteed by the system, and may cause crashes and erroneous behaviors. Therefore, we present iRAM, a personalized system that maintains optimal heap size limits to avoid crashes, efficiently maximizes free memory levels, and cleans low-priority processes to reduce application delays. The evaluation on memory hungry applications indicates that iRAM reduces application crashes by up to 14 percent, and reduces launch delays by up to 78.2 percent. In addition, the results confirm that iRAM increases free memory levels by up to 4.8 times. This performance gain comes with 3.5 percent of CPU overhead and 0.9 percent of power overhead.