Google is working to bring some memory management changes from Chrome OS to smartphones
No matter how much RAM manufacturers pour into their smartphones, we’ve all experienced Android killing background apps a little too relentlessly. At best, it might mean relaunching your last-played song on Spotify, or reloading a tweet on Twitter, but in some cases, you might end up losing unsaved data. With an upcoming change to Android currently in testing, Google might finally be ready to improve how background task management works.
The folks at XDA Developers spotted a new commit on the Android Gerrit that follows through on some changes the company has been working towards on Chrome OS. Google is working to implement MGLRU, or “Multi-Generational Least Recently Used,” as a policy on Android. After initially rolling it out to millions of Chrome OS users, the company has merged it into Android 13’s kernel, potentially readying to expand its reach to countless smartphone owners.
MGLRU should help Android better choose which apps should be killed silently in the background than the current process, boosting performance by shutting down the least-used apps on a device. According to archived Linux entries by a senior software engineer at Google from January, the company has already started testing this sort of memory management with about a million Android devices, though as XDA points out, those numbers likely point to Android Runtime on Chrome OS — not smartphones. Still, early results sound promising:
Google’s fleetwide profiling shows an overall 40% decrease in kswapd CPU usage, in addition to improvements in other UX metrics, e.g., an 85% decrease in the number of low-memory kills at the 75th percentile and an 18% decrease in rendering latency at the 50th percentile.
Decreased kswapd usage should return improved CPU performance, which is great for any device from low-end models to flagships, but it’s the low-memory kill numbers that have us excited. It’s possible this change doesn’t arrive in Android 13, though it’s certainly being prepared for a future version of the OS. A second Gerrit commit points to the ability to enable MGLRU using ADB commands, so who knows — maybe we’ll get to try this out once the upcoming Android 13 beta program is live.
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