Where Did My Memory Go? An Interactive Visualization Approach to Investigate Memory Consumption on Android Devices

The analysis of memory consumption is important for the stability and performance of Android applications. This work presents a method to extract and visualize memory-related data from Android bug report files, focusing on improving the debugging process for potential memory issues. The proposed method utilizes regular expressions for extracting key memory metrics and presents this data through interactive visualizations, aiding developers in identifying memory performance issues. We demonstrate the use of this visualization approach through an experimental analysis involving a high memory pressure scenario. This scenario allowed us to monitor memory consumption over time and analyze the causes of process terminations under this stress condition. Future work will involve evaluating the method's effectiveness under varying memory pressure scenarios, using the same or similar applications, and integrating advanced learning techniques for log analysis to capture complex patterns related to memory issues, ultimately helping to optimize system performance.