Ross McIlroy
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Over the last years, web browsing has been steadily shifting from desktop computers to mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. However, mobile browsers available today have mainly focused on performance rather than power consumption, although the battery life of a mobile device is one of the most important usability metrics. This is because many of these browsers have originated in the desktop domain and have been ported to the mobile domain. Such browsers have multiple power hungry components such as the rendering engine, and the JavaScript engine, and generate high workload without considering the capabilities and the power consumption characteristics of the underlying hardware platform. Also, the lack of coordination between a browser application and the power manager in the operating system (such as Android) results in poor power savings. In this paper, we propose a power manager that takes into account the internal state of a browser – that we refer to as a phase – and show with Google’s Chrome running on Android that up to 57.4% more energy can be saved over Android’s default power managers. We implemented and evaluated our technique on a heterogeneous multi-processing (HMP) ARM big.LITTLE platform such as the ones found in most modern smartphones.
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Idle Time Garbage Collection Scheduling
Ulan Degenbaev
Manfred Ernst
37th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, ACM, New York, NY, USA (2016), pp. 570-583
Preview abstract
Efficient garbage collection is increasingly important in today's managed language runtime systems that demand low latency, low memory consumption, and high throughput. Garbage collection may pause the application for many milliseconds to identify live memory, free unused memory, and compact fragmented regions of memory, even when employing concurrent garbage collection. In animation-based applications that require 60 frames per second, these pause times may be observable, degrading user experience. This paper introduces idle time garbage collection scheduling to increase the responsiveness of applications by hiding expensive garbage collection operations inside of small, otherwise unused idle portions of the application's execution, resulting in smoother animations. Additionally we take advantage of idleness to reduce memory consumption while allowing higher memory use when high throughput is required. We implemented idle time garbage collection scheduling in V8, an open-source, production JavaScript virtual machine running within Chrome. We present performance results on various benchmarks running popular webpages and show that idle time garbage collection scheduling can significantly improve latency and memory consumption. Furthermore, we introduce a new metric called frame time discrepancy to quantify the quality of the user experience and precisely measure the improvements that idle time garbage collection scheduling provides for a WebGL-based game benchmark. Idle time garbage collection scheduling is shipped and enabled by default in Chrome.
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