ICE: Collaborating Memory and Process Management for User Experience on Resource-limited Mobile Devices

Mobile devices with limited resources are prevalent as they have a relatively low price. Providing a good user experience with limited resources has been a big challenge. This paper found that foreground applications are often unexpectedly interfered by background applications' memory activities. Improving user experience on resource-limited mobile devices calls for a strong collaboration between memory and process management. This paper proposes a framework, Ice, to optimize the user experience on resource-limited mobile devices. With Ice, processes that will cause frequent refaults in the background are identified and frozen accordingly. The frozen application will be thawed when memory condition allows. Evaluation of resource-limited mobile devices demonstrates that the user experience is effectively improved with Ice. Specifically, Ice boosts the frame rate by 1.57x on average over the state-of-the-art.