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Application Performance Profiling in Android Dalvik Virtual Machines

2016; Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers; Volume: E99.D; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1587/transinf.2015edp7277

1745-1361

Hung-Cheng Chang, Kuei-Chung CHANG, Ying‐Dar Lin, Yuan‐Cheng Lai,

Cloud Computing and Resource Management

Most Android applications are written in JAVA and run on a Dalvik virtual machine. For smartphone vendors and users who wish to know the performance of an application on a particular smartphone but cannot obtain the source code, we propose a new technique, Dalvik Profiler for Applications (DPA), to profile an Android application on a Dalvik virtual machine without the support of source code. Within a Dalvik virtual machine, we determine the entry and exit locations of a method, log its execution time, and analyze the log to determine the performance of the application. Our experimental results show an error ratio of less than 5% from the baseline tool Traceview which instruments source code. The results also show some interesting behaviors of applications and smartphones: the performance of some smartphones with higher hardware specifications is 1.5 times less than the phones with lower specifications. DPA is now publicly available as an open source tool.