Enlarging I/O Size for Faster Loading of Mobile Applications

As the size of mobile applications grows rapidly, the importance of application loading performance is increasingly emphasized in mobile devices. However, current operating systems rely on demand paging to load the working set of applications into memory, which typically generates small size input/outputs (I/Os) that are not handled well by mobile flash storage devices. We propose an aggressive merging scheme, which consists of an explicit application loading method and a series of optimization techniques: I/O reordering, I/O merging, and I/O padding. The key idea behind our scheme is to enlarge I/O size for application loading to increase the effective storage throughput. Experiments show that our scheme effectively increases the average I/O size by $5.6\times $ , leading to 30% reduction of working set loading time.