Web Performance with Android's Battery-Saver Mode

Abstract

A Web browser utilizes a device's CPU to parse HTML, build a Document Object Model, a Cascading Style Sheets Object Model, and render trees, and parse, compile, and execute computationally-heavy JavaScript. A powerful CPU is required to perform these tasks as quickly as possible and provide the user with a great experience. However, increased CPU performance comes with increased power consumption and reduced battery life on mobile devices. As an option to extend battery life, Android offers a battery-saver mode that when activated, turns off the power-hungry and faster processor cores and turns on the battery-conserving and slower processor cores on the device. The transition from using faster processor cores to using slower processor cores throttles the CPU clock speed on the device, and therefore impacts the webpage load process.We utilize a large-scale data-set collected by a real user monitoring system of a major content delivery network to investigate the impact of Android's battery-saver mode on various mobile Web performance metrics. Our analysis suggests that users of select smartphones of Huawei and Sony experience a sudden or gradual degradation in Web performance when battery-saver mode is active. Batterysaver mode on newer flagship smartphones, however, does not impact the mobile Web performance. Finally, we encourage for new website design goals that treat slow (and throttled-CPU) devices kindly in favor of improving end-user experience and suggest that Web performance measurements should be aware of user device battery charge levels to correctly associate Web performance.

QUAREM: Maximising QoE Through Adaptive Resource Management in Mobile MPSoC Platforms

“…This is considered for comparison because of its popularity in flagship commercial smartphones as it provides energy efficiency and user satisfaction by balancing the trade-off between energy and QoS. (2) Powersave Governor (PS) [25]: This approach focuses on minimizing the power consumption by ensuring the power hungry cores are operated at low frequency. Although the implementation of Powersave on the experimental platform occasionally allows the CPU frequency to scale to the maximum frequency (2.80 GHz) depending on the workload requirements [56], it predominantly operates at low frequency (825 MHz) as shown in Fig.…”