Current Linux memory management algorithms have been applied for many years. Android inherits Linux kernel, and thus the memory management algorithms of Linux are transplanted to Android smartphones. To evaluate the efficiency of the memory management algorithms of Android, page re-fault is applied as the target metric in this paper. Through carefully designed experiments, this paper shows that current memory management algorithms are not working well on Android smartphones. For example, page re-fault is up to 37% when running a set of popular apps, which means a large proportion of pages evicted by the existing memory management algorithms are accessed again in the near future. Furthermore, the causes of the high page re-fault ratio are analyzed. Based on the analysis, a tradeoff between the reclaim size and the overall performance is uncovered. By exploiting this tradeoff, a preliminary idea is proposed to improve the performance of Android smartphones.
