Performance optimization opportunities in the Android software stack

The smartphone hardware and software ecosystems have evolved very rapidly. Multiple innovations in the system software, including OS, languages, and runtimes have been made in the last decade. Although, performance characterization of microarchitecture has been done, there is little analysis available for application performance bottlenecks of the system software stack, especially for contemporary applications on mobile operating systems.

In this work, we perform system utilization analysis from a software perspective, thereby supplementing the hardware perspective offered by prior work. We focus our analysis on Android powered smartphones, running newer versions of Android. Using 11 representative apps and regions of interest within them, we carry out performance analysis of the entire Android software stack to identify system performance bottlenecks.

We observe that for the majority of apps, the most time-consuming system level thread is a frame rendering thread. However, more surprisingly, our results indicate that all apps spend a significant amount of time doing Inter Process Communication (IPC), hinting that the Android IPC stack is a ripe target for performance optimization via software development and a potential target for hardware acceleration.