Publication IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and SystemsVol.E99-DNo.5pp.1296-1303 Publication Date: 2016/05/01 Publicized: 2016/01/25 Online ISSN: 1745-1361 DOI: 10.1587/transinf.2015EDP7277 Type of Manuscript: PAPER Category: Software System Keyword: Android, Dalvik virtual machine, profiling,
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Summary: Most Android applications are written in JAVA and run on a Dalvik virtual machine. For smartphone vendors and users who wish to know the performance of an application on a particular smartphone but cannot obtain the source code, we propose a new technique, Dalvik Profiler for Applications (DPA), to profile an Android application on a Dalvik virtual machine without the support of source code. Within a Dalvik virtual machine, we determine the entry and exit locations of a method, log its execution time, and analyze the log to determine the performance of the application. Our experimental results show an error ratio of less than 5% from the baseline tool Traceview which instruments source code. The results also show some interesting behaviors of applications and smartphones: the performance of some smartphones with higher hardware specifications is 1.5 times less than the phones with lower specifications. DPA is now publicly available as an open source tool.