ShuffleDog: Characterizing and Adapting User-Perceived Latency of Android Apps

Numerous complains have been made by Android users who severely suffer from the sluggish response when interacting with their devices. However, very few studies have been conducted to understand the user-perceived latency or mitigate the UI-lagging problem. In this paper, we conduct the first systematic measurement study to quantify the user-perceived latency using typical interaction-intensive Android apps in running with and without background workloads. We reveal the insufficiency of Android system in ensuring the performance of foreground apps and therefore design a new system to address the insufficiency accordingly. We develop a lightweight tracker to accurately identify all delay-critical threads that contribute to the slow response of user interactions. We then build a resource manager that can efficiently schedule various system resources including CPU, I/O, and GPU, for optimizing the performance of these threads. We implement the proposed system on commercial smartphones and conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate our implementation. Evaluation results show that our system is able to significantly reduce the user-perceived latency of foreground apps in running with aggressive background workloads, up to 10x, while incurring negligible system overhead of less than 3.1 percent CPU and 7 MB memory.