An Investigative Approach to Software Aging in Android Applications

Araújo, Jean; Alves, Vandi; Oliveira, Danilo; Dias, Pedro; Silva, Bruno; Maciel, Paulo

doi:10.1109/smc.2013.213

Cited by 29 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…A possible approach to confirm the observed leaks would require an expensive source code analysis of the apps to find the causes of these object replications. An alternative approach to validate memory leaks, which is widely adopted in the literature [9], [17], [24], consists of monitoring the heap memory usage during the app execution and of observing the possible performance degradation.…”

Section: Exploratory Study: Finding Object Replicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In addition, Android programmers often use Lint [29], a static analysis tool integrated in the Android Studio programming environment, for the detection of a large and extensible set of bad smells, including some smells related to memory leaks. As regards the second category of techniques, which are based on dynamic analysis, monitoring and testing of the apps, the oldest relevant contribution is the one of Araujo et al [9]. These authors proposed in 2013 a leak detection technique based on monitoring the trend of heap memory size in an Android app in response to a stress testing session carried out with Monkey.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Performance testing is particularly relevant to mobile apps, since they may be exposed to well-known problems of software aging [6], [7]. Software aging refers to the progressive performance degradation of long-time running software, which may by caused by the reduction of available memory [8], or the increasing use of virtual memory [9], and may cause worsening of application responsiveness [10], and application or system crashes [11]. Software aging is known to occur for Android smartphones and may greatly affect user's experience, especially after a long period of usage.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Do Memories Haunt You? An Automated Black Box Testing Approach for Detecting Memory Leaks in Android Apps

et al. 2020

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Memory leaks represent a remarkable problem for mobile app developers since a waste of memory due to bad programming practices may reduce the available memory of the device, slow down the apps, reduce their responsiveness and, in the worst cases, they may cause the crash of the app. A common cause of memory leaks in the specific context of Android apps is the bad handling of the events tied to the Activity Lifecycle. In order to detect and characterize these memory leaks, we present FunesDroid, a toolsupported black box technique for the automatic detection of memory leaks tied to the Activity Lifecycle in Android apps. FunesDroid implements a testing approach that can find memory leaks by analyzing unnecessary heap object replications after the execution of three different sequences of Activity Lifecycle events. In the paper, we present an exploratory study that shows the capability of the proposed technique to detect memory leaks and to characterize them in terms of their size, persistence and growth trend. The study also illustrates how memory leak causes can be detected with the support of the information provided by the FunesDroid tool. INDEX TERMS Android, Android activity lifecycle, memory leak, resource leak, Android testing.

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Section: Exploratory Study: Finding Object Replicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Do Memories Haunt You? An Automated Black Box Testing Approach for Detecting Memory Leaks in Android Apps

et al. 2020

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“…In [25], a performance comparison of Android virtual machines and Java virtual machines (JVM) is presented, and their energy consumption is discussed. Araujo et al [26] proposes an investigative approach to software aging in Android applications. Experimental results confirmed both the effectiveness of the procedure and the existence of software aging phenomenon in the Foursquare application running on the Android OS platform.…”

Section: Software Aging and Rejuvenationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Software Aging Issues in Streaming Video Player

Araújo¹,

Oliveira²,

Matos³

et al. 2016

JSW

Self Cite

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Many researchers around the world are working hard to improve cloud-based services focusing on server-side and communication aspects. This is especially true for services which demand high processing power and storage space on their server's infrastructure, such as live video streaming on the web and video on demand. However, issues on client-side applications are often neglected or studied to a lower extent. In this context, this paper evaluates the occurrence of software aging in a web browser plug-in for video streaming. The case study is carried out by using an automated workload that simulates the user behavior accessing videos on YouTube. Time series were used to predict the resources utilization ahead of time, enabling the prevention of performance degradation and unexpected crashes. Finally, the prediction-based strategy is compared to the time-based strategy, showing the impact of both on system's availability.

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“…Systems with long-time of execution may suffer from software aging effects [11]. Published works presented software aging indicators on software as Android OS [12] [13], Stream Video Player [14], Software-Defined Networking Controllers [15], Cloud Com-puting Open-Source Software [16], among others. Especially on Cloud Computing and Virtualized Server Environments, the VMM (Virtual Machine Monitor) is liable to suffer software aging, as presented in [6] [7].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

SWARE: An approach to support software aging and rejuvenation experiments

Melo

Araújo

Umesh

et al. 2017

JADI

Self Cite

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Abstract-The need for uninterrupted computing services demands for high system availability and reliability. Techniques and methods to estimate and analyze system dependability are essential to support software deployment and maintenance. Soft-ware aging appears as a relevant issue in this context. Software aging is a cumulative process which leads long-running systems to hangs or failures. Software rejuvenation is used to counteract software aging. Software rejuvenation usually comprises system reboot or application restart to bringing software to a stable fresh state. This paper proposes an approach to investigate software aging effects and software rejuvenation effectiveness on a single experiment. The approach has three phases: (i) Stress Phase -stress environment with the accelerated workload to induce bugs activation; (ii) Wait Phase -stop workload submission to observe the system state after workload submission; (iii) Rejuvenation Phase -find the impacts caused by the software rejuvenation. We named our approach as SWARE (Stress-Wait-Rejuvenation). To validate the SWARE approach, we present a case study. This case study consists of an experiment of VM Live Migration as rejuvenation mechanism for VMM software aging. The considered testbed is a Private Cloud with OpenNebula and KVM 1.0. The obtained results show that VM live migration is useful as rejuvenation for VMM software aging.

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An Investigative Approach to Software Aging in Android Applications

Cited by 29 publications

References 16 publications

Do Memories Haunt You? An Automated Black Box Testing Approach for Detecting Memory Leaks in Android Apps

Do Memories Haunt You? An Automated Black Box Testing Approach for Detecting Memory Leaks in Android Apps

Software Aging Issues in Streaming Video Player

SWARE: An approach to support software aging and rejuvenation experiments

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