PMR: Fast Application Response via Parallel Memory Reclaim on Mobile Devices

Mobile applications exhibit increasingly high memory demands, making efficient memory management critical for enabling fast and responsive user experiences. However, our analysis of Android systems reveals inefficiencies in the current kernel-level memory reclaim design, which struggles to meet the performance demands of modern apps and fails to exploit upgraded storage devices. To address this challenge, we propose PMR, a parallel memory reclaim scheme. PMR introduces two key techniques: proactive page shrinking (PPS) and storage-friendly page writeback (SPW). PPS enhances the memory reclaim process by decoupling the time-consuming steps of page shrinking and page writeback for parallel execution, while SPW optimizes write I/O operations through batched unmapping of victim pages for bulk, efficient writeback. Experimental results on real-world mobile devices demonstrate that PMR can improve application response times by up to 43.6% compared to the original Android memory reclaim approach. © 2025 by The USENIX Association. All rights reserved.