"There has been tremendous growth in the use of smartphones. Today, there are more than 130 million Android users in the world. Android smartphones leverage flash storage. Flash is great for supporting fast random I/O workloads but due to wear leveling, there is an impact on the life of the underlying flash device. There are strategies that can be used to improve the lifespan of flash storage on smartphones.
In this talk, we will focus on how we developed technology for converting small random I/O to large sequential I/O on Android devices and its impact on the Android flash health, as well as the impact on the load and store times of applications such as Camera, App store, etc. We leveraged techniques such as compression and deduplication to reduce the storage footprint on flash, and also made changes to the SQLite database to avoid frequent flushing of data. This enabled us to serve a lot of the I/O requests from the buffer cache on these Android devices."
