Uncovering Critical Data in Launching Mobile Applications to Improve User Experience at Low Cost

Application launch time is an important user experience metric for mobile devices. The latency of page cache misses occupies a large percentage of application launch time. The previous works reduce the page cache misses during application launching by prefetching soon-to-be-used applications to the page cache. However, these proposals have to prefetch multiple massive files to the main memory, which can thrash applications’ own data and degrade applications’ performance. In this paper, we first investigate the root cause of these page cache misses and systematically study data access behavior of multiple applications in Android. Based on our analysis, we observe that an extremely small set of data ( 0.3% on average of the total data used to launch an app) is responsible for most of the page cache misses. We define these sets of data as critical data.