TY - GEN
T1 - Experience
T2 - 26th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, MobiCom 2020
AU - Li, Mingliang
AU - Lin, Hao
AU - Liu, Cai
AU - Li, Zhenhua
AU - Qian, Feng
AU - Liu, Yunhao
AU - Sun, Nian
AU - Xu, Tianyin
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 ACM.
PY - 2020/4/16
Y1 - 2020/4/16
N2 - Almost every Android user has unsatisfying experiences regarding responsiveness, in particular Application Not Responding (ANR) and System Not Responding (SNR) that directly disrupt user experience. Unfortunately, the community have limited understanding of the prevalence, characteristics, and root causes of unresponsiveness. In this paper, we make an in-depth study of ANR and SNR at scale based on fine-grained system-level traces crowdsourced from 30,000 Android systems. We find that ANR and SNR occur prevalently on all the studied 15 hardware models, and better hardware does not seem to relieve the problem. Moreover, as Android evolves from version 7.0 to 9.0, there are fewer ANR events but more SNR events. Most importantly, we uncover multifold root causes of ANR and SNR and pinpoint the largest inefficiency which roots in Android's flawed implementation of Write Amplification Mitigation (WAM). We design a practical approach to eliminating this largest root cause; after large-scale deployment, it reduces almost all (>99%) ANR and SNR caused by WAM while only decreasing 3% of the data write speed. In addition, we document important lessons we have learned from this study, and have also released our measurement code/data to the research community.
AB - Almost every Android user has unsatisfying experiences regarding responsiveness, in particular Application Not Responding (ANR) and System Not Responding (SNR) that directly disrupt user experience. Unfortunately, the community have limited understanding of the prevalence, characteristics, and root causes of unresponsiveness. In this paper, we make an in-depth study of ANR and SNR at scale based on fine-grained system-level traces crowdsourced from 30,000 Android systems. We find that ANR and SNR occur prevalently on all the studied 15 hardware models, and better hardware does not seem to relieve the problem. Moreover, as Android evolves from version 7.0 to 9.0, there are fewer ANR events but more SNR events. Most importantly, we uncover multifold root causes of ANR and SNR and pinpoint the largest inefficiency which roots in Android's flawed implementation of Write Amplification Mitigation (WAM). We design a practical approach to eliminating this largest root cause; after large-scale deployment, it reduces almost all (>99%) ANR and SNR caused by WAM while only decreasing 3% of the data write speed. In addition, we document important lessons we have learned from this study, and have also released our measurement code/data to the research community.
KW - Android
KW - application not responding (ANR)
KW - responsiveness
KW - system not responding (SNR)
KW - write amplification mitigation (WAM)
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85086142638&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85086142638&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3372224.3380897
DO - 10.1145/3372224.3380897
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85086142638
T3 - Proceedings of the Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, MOBICOM
SP - 255
EP - 265
BT - Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, MobiCom 2020
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 21 September 2020 through 25 September 2020
ER -