Events Calendar

CS Colloquium - Jitendra Padhye: AppInsight: Mobile App Performance Monitoring in the Wild

Speaker: Jitendra Padhye, Microsoft Research

Talk Title: AppInsight: Mobile App Performance Monitoring in the Wild

Series: CS Colloquium

Abstract: The mobile-app marketplace is highly competitive. To maintain and improve the quality of their apps, developers need data about how their app is performing in the wild. The asynchronous, multi-threaded nature of mobile apps makes tracing difficult. The difficulties are compounded by the resource limitations inherent in the mobile platform. To address this challenge, we develop AppInsight, a system that instruments mobile-app binaries to automatically identify the critical path in user transactions, across asynchronous-call boundaries. AppInsight is lightweight, it does not require any input from the developer, and it does not require any changes to the OS. We used AppInsight to instrument 30 marketplace apps, and carried out a field trial with 30 users for over 4 months. We report on the characteristics of the critical paths that AppInsight found in this data. We also give real-world examples of how AppInsight helped developers improve the quality of their app.

Biography: Jiendra Padhye is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research. His primary research area is computer networking, with recent focus on data centers and mobile systems.

Host: Minlan Yu & Ethan Katz-Bassett

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Assistant to CS chair