Optimizing File System Performance for Android-based Consumer Electronics by an Experimental Method

The widely spread mobile consumer electronic devices, such as Android-based smartphones and tablets, have employed Ext4 file system as their main partition’s file systems. Although the performance of Ext4 file system has been researched and optimized for traditional hard disk drives under general workloads, extensive investigations are urgently required to improve its performance for consumer electronics storage applications. In this paper, we experimentally investigate the performance-related features of Ext4 file system to optimize the performance of Android-based consumer electronic devices considering the underlying NAND flash-based storage devices. Specifically, by tuning the tested file size and file system workloads on real Android-based smartphone and tablet, we observe that the I/O bandwidth fluctuates quite a lot with the varying flex blocks group size in Ext4 file system. Furthermore, we draw an empirically conclusion for optimizing the Ext4 file system performance by polynomial fit.