Archer: Adaptive Memory Compression with Page-Association-Rule Awareness for High-Speed Response of Mobile Devices

In mobile systems, memory can be compressed page-by-page to save space. This approach is widely adopted because memory data is accessed by page. However, this paper shows that the system response speed is significantly limited by page-grained compression. In this paper, we observe that approximately a quarter of anonymous memory pages are highly correlated, even though the association is implicit. Inspired by this, we propose Archer, an association-rule-aware memory compression framework in mobile systems. Archer demonstrates that memory in mobile devices should be compressed using flexible granularity, rather than relying solely on traditional page compression. To further integrate association-rule mining techniques into system design, we redesign the LRU mechanism and propose an adaptive memory compression region. Experimental results show that the average app launching speed is 1.55x faster when enabling Archer, and the average photographic speed and frame rate increase by 1.42x and 1.31x, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art.