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The Effect of Background Services on Android Smartphone Performance

백그라운드 서비스가 안드로이드 스마트폰의 성능에 미치는 영향

  • Ahn, Woo Hyun (School of Software, Kwangwoon University) ;
  • Oh, Yunseok (Naver Corporation) ;
  • Oh, Jaewon (School of Computer Science and Information Engineering, The Catholic University of Korea)
  • Received : 2017.12.27
  • Accepted : 2018.01.17
  • Published : 2018.03.28

Abstract

In Android smartphones, many apps are developed as service apps to run in the background. If the memory is insufficient, Android forcibly terminates not only user apps that have not used the CPU for a long time, but also service apps. However, a service app is automatically re-launched after a short period of time, so that it continuously consumes memory space. This paper analyzes the number of running service apps and their memory usage in users' smartphones. The number of service apps accounts for up to 65% of the total number of running apps, and their memory usage accounts for up to 55% of the total memory. Moreover, we investigate the effect of the number of running service apps on the response time of smartphones and apps. As the number of service apps increases, the launching time of user apps increases to 22 times. The booting time and app installation time significantly increase with the number of service apps.

안드로이드 스마트폰에서 많은 앱들이 백그라운드로 실행되기 위해 서비스 앱으로 개발된다. 메모리가 부족하면 오랫동안 CPU를 사용하지 않은 사용자 앱뿐만 아니라 서비스 앱도 강제로 종료된다. 하지만, 서비스 앱은 잠시 후 자동으로 재실행되기 때문에 메모리 공간을 지속적으로 소비한다. 본 논문은 사용자들의 스마트폰에서 실행 중인 서비스 앱의 개수와 메모리 사용량을 조사한다. 서비스 앱의 개수는 전체 실행 중인 앱 개수의 최대 65%, 서비스 앱의 메모리 사용량은 전체 메모리의 최대 55%까지 차지한다. 또한, 실행 중인 서비스 앱의 개수가 스마트폰과 앱의 응답 시간에 미치는 영향을 분석한다. 서비스 앱의 개수가 증가할수록 사용자 앱의 시작 시간이 최대 22배까지 증가한다. 부팅 시간과 앱 설치 시간이 서비스 앱의 개수가 증가함에 따라 크게 증가한다.

Keywords

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