Where did my 256 GB go? A Measurement Analysis of Storage Consumption on Smart Mobile Devices
Where did my 256 GB go? A Measurement Analysis of Storage Consumption on Smart Mobile Devices
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DOI：
10.1145/3460095
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发表时间：
2021-05
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Ashish Bijlani;U. Ramachandran;R. Campbell
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文献类型：
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作者：
Ashish Bijlani;U. Ramachandran;R. Campbell
这项工作首次对智能移动设备上的应用程序（app）存储消耗行为进行了详细和大规模的测量分析。我们首先对数百万个 Android 应用程序进行为期五年的纵向静态分析，以研究其大小随时间的增长情况，并确定应用程序存储消耗的各种来源。我们的研究表明，移动应用程序已经发展成为大型整体包，其中包含了货币化/吸引用户的功能，并以冗余存储消耗为代价优化了性能。我们还对 140 名 Android 参与者进行了移动存储使用情况研究。我们在每个参与者的设备上构建并部署了一个轻量级上下文感知存储跟踪工具，称为 cosmos。利用我们的用户研究的痕迹，我们发现只有一小部分应用程序/功能被积极使用，并且使用情况与用户上下文相关。我们的研究结果表明，应用程序功能高度膨胀且未使用的功能，导致存储使用效率低下。此外，我们发现应用程序不受存储配额限制的限制，开发人员可以通过频繁缓存数据、创建调试日志、用户分析和根据需要下载广告来随意滥用持久存储。最后，根据我们的发现，我们讨论了高效移动存储管理的需求，并提出了一种弹性存储设计，以在未使用时回收存储空间。我们进一步确定研究挑战并量化此类设计的预期存储节省。我们相信我们的发现对于存储研究社区以及移动应用程序开发人员来说都很有价值。
This work presents the first-ever detailed and large-scale measurement analysis of storage consumption behavior of applications (apps) on smart mobile devices. We start by carrying out a five-year longitudinal static analysis of millions of Android apps to study the increase in their sizes over time and identify various sources of app storage consumption. Our study reveals that mobile apps have evolved as large monolithic packages that are packed with features to monetize/engage users and optimized for performance at the cost of redundant storage consumption. We also carry out a mobile storage usage study with 140 Android participants. We built and deployed a lightweight context-aware storage tracing tool, called cosmos, on each participant's device. Leveraging the traces from our user study, we show that only a small fraction of apps/features are actively used and usage is correlated to user context. Our findings suggest a high degree of app feature bloat and unused functionality, which leads to inefficient use of storage. Furthermore, we found that apps are not constrained by storage quota limits, and developers freely abuse persistent storage by frequently caching data, creating debug logs, user analytics, and downloading advertisements as needed. Finally, drawing upon our findings, we discuss the need for efficient mobile storage management, and propose an elastic storage design to reclaim storage space when unused. We further identify research challenges and quantify expected storage savings from such a design. We believe our findings will be valuable to the storage research community as well as mobile app developers.