Performance Analysis for Improved RAM Utilization for Android Applications Deepali Kayande #1 , Urmila Shrawankar #2 # Department of Computer Science & Engineering G. H. Raisoni College of Engineering, Nagpur, India 1 kayande.deepali@ieee.org, 2 urmila@ieee.org Abstract-- Memory management is a vital parameter in efficient working of any operating system. In the mobile devices, internal memory plays an important role in managing the running of process, services and applications which are either installed by the user or which are already present in the device. Thus this paper aims towards giving an approach for better utilization of the internal memory present in Android operating system for mobile phones. The memory architecture for the Android device has been studied and has been observed that the device comes loaded with many applications which require high RAM consumption for efficient working. Thus taking into consideration running of so many applications processes and services, it is important to efficiently use and manage the internal memory space present inside the mobile operating system. For this purpose, a dictionary based application called SMSLingo has been developed for compression of SMS texting. This application requires less memory space and less RAM consumption as compared to the default SMS messaging service provided by Android. Memory management of Android system has been compared with the one in Linux System. It has been observed that Mapped Memory, Anonymous Memory and Slab Memory is present in Android which is used for allotting temporary storage space for the data frequently used. Keywords: Linux Kernel, Dalvik Virtual Machine, Android Memory management, Android operating system, SMS text Compression, SMS language I. INTRODUCTION When mobile operating systems are considered, memory management plays the key role. As the mobile devices are constrained about the hardware part, special care has to be taken for the memory management. Android operating system is based on the Linux kernel which mainly has the paging system. The memory is categorised as internal memory, swap memory, external memory, etc. each having its own features and usage. The internal memory is used to store data like the text messages, multimedia messages, call logs, calendar activities, etc., unless and until the storage location is not changed and the by default settings are used. Efficient working of any operating system is based on its process management, device management and memory management. Out of these three issues, this paper talks about the memory management. As the name suggests, memory management helps in managing the system memory. The most important feature present in memory management is to enable dynamic allocation of portions of memory to the requesting processes. Memory management and memory optimization plays the most important role in any operating system, be it monolithic system or any mobile operating system. Various applications and approaches have been proposed in achieving the optimized use of memory in the operating system. This paper proposes one such application that aims at utilizing the internal memory of Android Mobile Operating System in an optimized fashion. Basic Android mobile phones support 150 MB of internal memory. Apart from the internal memory, mobile phones have an option of using the external memory which can be extended depending on the brand or type of the mobile phone handset. Thus the user can shift the desired applications from the internal memory to the external memory also. But basically the optimized and efficient use of the internal memory is a matter of concern. For the experimentation purpose, SMS application is being targeted, because by default all the SMS are stored inside the internal memory unless and until the storage location is not changed [2]. Thus the amount of memory saved after the optimization can be used for better functions [3]. Android device supports UTF-8 encoding of text characters in SMS application. Thus as compared to other mobile devices, Android consumes double amount of bytes while storing the SMS in inbox. Also, many Android devices do not support storing SMS in the external memory viz LG-C660. So, an application with less memory size and RAM requirement is developed in order to optimize the internal memory consumption during SMS texting is carried out on the device. The Experimental results are evaluated using 3 text compression techniques, Huffman Coding, RLE and SMS Lingo on few sample text data. Increase of 8-10% in compression ratio is achieved using the SMS Lingo compression algorithm in comparison with other available methods. Also this application is reasonably smaller in size as compared to the size of default SMS application present on Android platforms and smaller in comparison with the other SMS compressor