ElasticZRAM: Revisiting ZRAM for Swapping on Mobile Devices

Modern mobile devices adopt two-level memory swapping consisting of ZRAM and storage devices to relieve memory pressure. In the swap subsystem, ZRAM can improve application responsiveness and reduce write traffic to storage devices while consuming physical memory and additional CPU cycles. To better utilize ZRAM and improve system performance, we propose ElasticZRAM, an elastic ZRAM to redesign the traditional memory swapping with full awareness of the characteristics of applications and NAND flash-based storage devices on mobile devices. Experimental results on Google Pixel 6 demonstrate that ElasticZRAM improves application response time by up to 24.8% with negligible overhead compared with state-of-the-arts.