AndroScope: An Insightful Performance Analyzer for All Software Layers of the Android-Based Systems

Abstract

Android has become the most popular platform for mobile devices. However, Android still has critical performance issues, such as "application not responding" errors and hiccups resulting from garbage collection. Many phone vendors have tried to resolve the problems by characterizing and improving the performance. However, there are few insightful performance analysis tools for the Android-based systems. This paper presents AndroScope, which is a performance analysis tool for both the Android platform (Dalvik virtual machine, core libraries, Android libraries, and even Linux kernels) and its applications. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first tool to collect and analyze performance data from all the software layers of the Android-based systems. AndroScope offers a trace mechanism to collect such deep and wide performance data as hardware performance counters, time, and memory usage. In addition, the tool includes TraceBridge, which is a middleware for the fast handling of mass logs. Moreover, AndroScope offers an integrated graphical user interface with the Android software development kit to display a great volume of the detailed performance data.