Panappticon: Event-based Tracing to Measure Mobile Application and Platform Performance

Improving and optimizing user-perceived smartphone performance requires understanding device, system, and application behavior for real-world workloads. However, measuring such performance is challenging due to the multi-threaded, asynchronous programming paradigms used in modern applications and the multiple layers of hardware and software used to respond to user input events. We ad-dress this challenge with Panappticon, a lightweight, system-wide, fine-grained event tracing system for Android that automatically identifies critical execution paths in user transactions. Panappti-con monitors the application, system, and kernel software layers and can identify performance problems stemming from application design flaws, underpowered hardware, and harmful interactions be-tween apparently unrelated applications. We carried out a 14-user, one-month study of an Android smartphone system instrumented with Panappticon, which revealed a number of specific problems and areas for improvement that may be of interest to system de-signers, application developers, and device manufactures. 1