As XDA Developers reported, in a recent Android code review, it was found that Google has implemented a feature called Multi-Generational Least Recently Used (MGLRU), which is already in use on Chrome OS. MGLRU should help Android in making better decisions about which apps to silently kill in the background — it won’t close apps that you frequently use or that are too important to you, so missing notifications or destroyed drafts should become a thing of the past.
Android 13 is expected to have a slew of beneficial enhancements. From faster game loading times to alerting you if an app is using too much battery while running in the background, we’ve got you covered. Now, a new proposed feature has surfaced, which, if adopted, will provide Google’s next version of Android better control over your background apps.
Highlights
What do these dry figures mean for us? Well, kswapd needing 40% less than it usually does means we will get more CPU time to run other tasks and apps. A decrease of 18% in out-of-memory app kills implies that it’s 18% less likely for Android to kill an app that may be important to you. There is no word if indeed Google will release MGLRU with Android 13, but when it comes, this new feature no doubt will offer a better experience for all users of the OS.
According to archived Linux entries made by an engineer at Google, the tech giant has started testing the feature with around a million Android devices, and the results look promising. It should be noted that the tests were likely made on a virtual machine loaded with Android on Chrome OS, not on real smartphones. With MGLRU, Google managed to reach a 40% reduction in kswapd (the process that controls virtual memory) CPU usage and achieved a decrease of 18% of out-of-memory (OOM) app killings.
I hope they test this new feature extensively with as many apps as they can, especially Google and popular apps. Whatever Security update came in Android 12 over the past 2 – 3 months has broken MANY apps, especially Google, by killing background processes needed for some of these apps to operate. We need security and battery optimization, but we also need functional apps.
