IO characteristics of modern smartphone platform: Android vs. Tizen

Abstract

In this work, we examine the IO characteristics of two smartphone platforms: Android and Tizen. We compare how the two platforms differ in using the filesystem, using the database, and accessing the storage. We collected the IOs from select seven different apps that are commonly available on both platforms. By analyzing the collected the IOs on both platforms, a dominant fraction of writes are 4 KB synchronous. On Android and Tizen, respectively, 65% and 45% of all write IO counts 4 KB; 47% and 75% of all writes accesses are SQLite related files such as database, rollback journal, WAL (Write Ahead Log), and etc.; 81% and 86% of all IOs are random accesses; and 90% and 52% of all writes counts are synchronous IO mode. According to our IO analysis, Android IO stack is more sophisticated then Tizen one: (i) disables a time updates, (ii) adopts journal asynchronous commit, and (iii) adopts fdatasync( ) in SQLite.