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

Abstract

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.

A Survey of Performance Optimization for Mobile Applications

“…A total of three fuzzing types (application, resource, and API) are used in their experiments, which discovered crashes due to memory leaks in realworld applications. Furthermore, memory leaks can be identified by analyzing memory dumps [52], [139], the activity lifecycle [125], source code patterns [124] or memory execution information by applying process control block hooking [122]. [122] 2012 IJCA Shahriar et al [123] 2014 HASE Hecht et al [51] 2016 MobileSoft Santhanakrishnan et al [124] 2016 i-Society Tasneem et al [52] 2019 IJCA Amalfitano et al [125] 2020 IEEE Access Garbage collection He et al [39] 2011 IFIP Gerlitz et al [126] 2013 JTRES Lim et al [127] 2013 ICCE Mori et al [128] 2017 GCCE Tasneem et al [52] 2019 IJCA Deduplication Kim et al [129] 2014 ICSE Lee et al [29] 2015 APSys Memory management Kim et al [130] 2013 IEEE TCE Jeong et al [131] 2013 USENIX ATC Zhong et al [132] 2014 EMSOFT Kim et al [133] 2015 ISMM Nguyen et al [134] 2016 WiMob Kim and Bahn.…”

“…Memory is mostly optimized by removing antipatterns [51], [52], [122], [124], [125] and applying different strategies for the garbage collection [39], [52], [96], [110], [126], [127], [128].…”

“…Removing antipatterns can reduce the number of garbage collection calls as well [51], whereas memory leaks reduce available memory and responsiveness [125].…”

Dynamic Testing Techniques of Non-functional Requirements in Mobile Apps: A Systematic Mapping Study

“…The need to test how apps impact battery/power consumption [34], [35], [65], [83], [10], [1], [92], [19], [43], [76], [53] Performance bugs are very diicult to be detected and reproduced [57], [24], [51] Performance testing is a very time-consuming task [43] Lack of tools or methodologies for performance testing [34], [35], [83], [1], [36] The need to detect memory leaks [6] Poor performance apps negatively impact the user experience [6], [51], [90] App performance may vary diferent mobile platforms [81], [76] Developers do not have proper knowledge about performance, therefore they are not careful with this q.c [81], [6], [21], [19] S Developers do not have proper knowledge about security, therefore they are not careful with this q.c [7], [70], [75], [28], [58], [12], [72], [88], [29], [41], [47], [9], [82], [84], [54],…”

“…It is worth pointing out that 5 of the considered studies presented a testing technique for hybrid mobile apps, which are apps combining elements of both native and web apps. They can be developed using frameworks, such as React Native 5 or Flutter 6 . The widespread use of Android as a case study can be justiied by the fact that it is the most widespread mobile platform worldwide and it is also open source.…”