Performance analysis of Android underlying virtual machine in mobile phones

In recent years, Android is widely used in cell phones. Dalvik is the virtual machine which is embedded inside the Android operating system, and executes the Android-based applications. Thus, improving efficiency of the Dalvik virtual machine plays an important role in optimizing performance of android-based mobile phones. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of the Dalvik bytecodes and their frequency of use in common Android applications and use the results to determine the most frequently used bytecodes in Dalvik virtual machine to identify best targets for improvement. Our analysis showed that over 82% of total execution time of our Android benchmarks is spent by onl.y 5 families of instructions.