Is there a way to partition the SD card in such a way that the EVO can access it for RAM? Running some of the newer sense 2.1 and 3.0 roms my RAM tends to dip down as low as almost 50MB free, and I'm constantly having to kill tasks to free up more. Any ideas?
Not really. RAM and storage are different things. Granted, there is the concept of a swap file, but I don't think that's something people generally see as very useful in Android. See this article:
http://zerocredibility.wordpress.com/2009/08/24/why-android-swap-doesnt-make-sense/
Eh I didn't think so.... I've even noticed on the EVO 3D that it's a process hog too. Oh well. Thanks for the reply.
Related
Ive read through dozens of threads asking this very question. Is there anyway to avoid having all of your internal memory sucked up by the great unknown? Im running defrost with all my apps installed on the microSD card.
Sent from my HTC Desire using XDA App
Don't think this is possible because some application data is partially stored in the phone in /data/data/* too. Nothing moves /data/data to SD card, because this would result in instability and generally poor performance. You could move the app and dalvik-cache to SD with less trouble, but /data/data is buggy, so that stays on the phone.
Download Cache cleaner like CacheCleaner or CacheMate from the Marketplace, this will free up some space for you.
Sent from my HTC Desire using XDA App
Thanks for the tip!
Freed up about 4 MBs. Hmm... Maybe I've adopted Android a wee bit too soon. Figured they'd have something as fundamental as this solved by now.
Xephrey said:
Freed up about 4 MBs. Hmm... Maybe I've adopted Android a wee bit too soon. Figured they'd have something as fundamental as this solved by now.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It is a common misconception that this is somehow Androids "fault".
Quite simply - it isn't. It is the hardware manufacturers who are not building enough physical storage into the device. There's absolutely no reason, other than cost, why someone couldn't build a phone with more memory available for apps etc - in fact, the Dell Streak has 2gb space for apps which is likely to be more than enough.
Regards,
Dve
Good point. I was too quick to stack all the blame on Android. What would be SUPER cool is a phone with dual MicroSD slots. That way, one could be dedicated to apps and one to mounting, unmounting / whatever.
Can we repartition the mtd like the g1 users can?
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=7061471#post7061471
cause i think for those who are not using sense ui, there is a lot of space unused on the system partition that can be transfered to data partition for our apps.
I keep seeing everybody talking about having an sd-ext partition and how much better it
makes the phone run. Is it possible with a g2, and if so, how do you do it?
Sent from my HTC Vision using XDA App
http://forums.virtuousrom.com/index.php/topic,58.0.html
If you're running a Sense 3.0+ port I can see the need for swap but for AOSP based ROMs there's no need. We have plenty of RAM. It can actually induce lag and slow things down using it. Use compcache if you really need the extra RAM - of course it will slow things down a bit too but shouldn't be as bad.
As far as using an EXT partition, yet again you don't need it. These things were/are useful for older phones and lower end phones with limited memory and RAM. Unless you just download every app in the market you see, you should have plenty of space on your phone for all your apps. There's no performance gain by putting the apps on your sdcard in an EXT partition.
I am convinced it hurts more than helps on a phone with a decent amount of memory such as the Evo.
I'm also convinced anyone talking about how swap could improve things usually isn't talking about an Evo. Most of the gushing reports of swap nirvana I have come across were written years ago** when android phones were new and had very small amounts of RAM.
Basically, what it comes down to is this:
Android has ways of managing memory.
Tons of tweaks and scripts (eg task killers, v6, juwe, carodope et al) have tried to improve upon this.
If you add swap into the mix you have a mess. They fight each other.
In my experience it adds significant, experience-wrecking lag, even on a fast SD card.
And for what?
So you can occasionally run a large app (and on an Evo it would have to be *very* large), pop over to different app, and resume the original large app slightly faster than you could have using normal memory management techniques.
For me it's clearly not worth it. If you have had a great experience with swap on an Evo I'd love to hear about it.
** some background reading for those new to swap:
http://zerocredibility.wordpress.com/2009/08/24/why-android-swap-doesnt-make-sense/
http://wiki.cyanogenmod.com/wiki/Swap_and_Compcache
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq
What about if you would set swapiness real low like 0-10
Then only when the extra memory is absolutely needed it would be used. I find that even using tweaks like v6 smurf ropeadope jade etc only running fairly aggressive settings keeps things running smooth. Bad part is that it kills multitasking.
In my evo running memory settings that are fairly balanced keeping recent apps that I'm using in memory will result in the odd reeboot because of low memory. Not excessively so but I usually know when its coming. It depends on how much I'm using my phone too.
How big of a swap have you played with and what swapiness settings?
What memory monitoring tools do people use?
To answer your questions, I mostly used a 64 MB swap partition, and occasionally a swap file on the main SD card partition, but did not try a large swap file on the order of 256 or 512 MB.
I also experimented with swappiness values of 0 10 and 60.
I would periodically check the output of the "free" command to see if the swap partition was even being used.
Swappiness 10 rarely seemed to cause any paging at all. 60 showed a lot of usage, but also seemed to create a lot of lag.
I used Go Task Manager to look at memory usage. I would launch a lot of fat apps (the xda app is a huge memory hog for some reason) and see if switching between them was any better or worse than usual. I don't think I ever said to myself "this is noticeably better".
For whatever reason, I can't get Go Task Manager to ever report more than 300, maybe 305 MB of memory was being used, swap or no swap.
I noticed using swap does not show any more memory is "available". I think of a swap file as something akin to a windows pagefile. It used to be pretty easy to see when you were using a lot of virtual memory in Windows, but I'm not sure I am using the right tools to monitor performance on android.
One might think running a kernel that allows swap would allow the phone to behave as if it had more memory "available" (even if a performance hit was associated in accessing the extra "memory"). I guess either this assumption is incorrect, or (my personal suspicion) other memory management strategies are baked in to my current ROM+kernel combo that already monitor memory usage and usually step in and kill things before memory usage ever gets above a certain level.
After closing out 29 apps with ram manager, im yielding 1.05gb out of 1.78gb total,
Im literally watching the 1.05 fluctuate to 1.06 1.10 .1.12 back to 1.05
This phone I mean is it that much more packed with system apps/data vs where I remember every other s3 and note 2 I owned had like 650-750mb used out of a total 1.78 available even after closing all apps and clearing ram.
And that was even with BLOATWARE.
I bring this up cause im getting a Low Memory notification out of nowhere?!
Sent from my SGH-M919 using xda premium
lojak29 said:
After closing out 29 apps with ram manager, im yielding 1.05gb out of 1.78gb total,
Im literally watching the 1.05 fluctuate to 1.06 1.10 .1.12 back to 1.05
This phone I mean is it that much more packed with system apps/data vs where I remember every other s3 and note 2 I owned had like 650-750mb used out of a total 1.78 available even after closing all apps and clearing ram.
And that was even with BLOATWARE.
I bring this up cause im getting a Low Memory notification out of nowhere?!
Sent from my SGH-M919 using xda premium
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
low memory as in RAM or low memory as in storage.
if its storage im having the same problem.
If its RAM, use something like rom toolboxes task manager to see whats running. im only using between 700-800 mb of ram, without clearing it
first off... android was designed to use Memory in much the same way linux does, (memory that isnt being used is wasted memory). Task killers actually cause more harm then good... they send a SIGKILL instead of SIGTERM. Its along the same lines as shutting your computer down every day vs just yanking the power cord out...
http://www.howtogeek.com/127388/htg-explains-why-you-shouldnt-use-a-task-killer-on-android/
http://thelinuxnewbie.blogspot.com/2006/08/linux-uses-too-much-memory-very-basic.html
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=175419
My only guess in regards to the warning would be a malicious [side-loaded] app trying to run an exploit... or killing running processes constantly has caused a memory leak somewhere via corrupted database/config file... or there is a bug somewhere if you are running a custom rom.
Just let the system handle your memory... it was designed [from the ground up] to be incredibly good at this.
lojak29 said:
After closing out 29 apps with ram manager, im yielding 1.05gb out of 1.78gb total,
Im literally watching the 1.05 fluctuate to 1.06 1.10 .1.12 back to 1.05
This phone I mean is it that much more packed with system apps/data vs where I remember every other s3 and note 2 I owned had like 650-750mb used out of a total 1.78 available even after closing all apps and clearing ram.
And that was even with BLOATWARE.
I bring this up cause im getting a Low Memory notification out of nowhere?!
Sent from my SGH-M919 using xda premium
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Low memory has nothing to do with how large or small the rom is or how many apps you have in the system/app folder.
Think of memory like this, a computer can have as little as 2GB of memory modules, but people want faster
computers with a lot more RAM in the memory modules which plug into the computers motherboards.
That's why a lot of people have 8 or even 16GB of memory inside their computers to make them faster.
When your talking about how many apps there are, or how large or how many megabytes a rom takes
up in space you are not thinking of it in the proper terms, think of it as "hard drive space".
If you get a larger hard drive you will have more free space for applications, games, music, videos & a lot of other things.
Bloatware also takes up space on the sdcards just like it would on a hard drive, but none of these things use any more or
less of the available memory in your phone. (RAM)
None of these things have anything to do with your low memory notifications, there is a notification in the phone
which notifies you if your low on space on your internal and external sdcards (they are like solid state hard drives).
If you are getting low memory notifications from no where, it must be some rogue apps or
app that you installed which is misbehaving and or is not 100% compatible with your phone.
I found out Why I had lowmem
Went to file manager and checked storage space...
My twrp backups were taking up 5.86gigs of internal ya Thats a Crap ton of spce to use up on nandroids ...I think its cause all my backups had backed up /system
Sent from my SGH-M919 using xda premium
For future reference (after hearing your fix/reply)... you were running out of storage space (where user accessible data goes), not memory (RAM).
if you keep calling the storage space memory, your gonna keep confusing the hell out of everyone.
Ok so I was running an app to check on CPU speeds (unrelated research) when I noticed that this same app was saying I only had 340mb of RAM free...
This seemed a bit strange, considering this tablet has 3GB of RAM on board, and I'm not really running anything at the moment.
I went into the storage setting page, and looked at running processes, and it says that I am using 2.5GB of my RAM.
but... if I add up all the ram usage on all the running processes, it only adds up to about 500mb....
So what is using up the other 2gb?
If anyone has any suggestions, it'd be nice, as at the moment it seems I only have 1gb of usable RAM in this device...
EDIT:
Nevermind, I think I solved it... sort of. I found that the ram clearing button is in a different place than I remember, and I have managed to clear out some more space... though even after a full reset 1.5gb of ram is immediately being used. Seems a lot.
Though this is a stock rom etc so I suspect thats normal.
electrical tcfpain
nirurin said:
Ok so I was running an app to check on CPU speeds (unrelated research) when I noticed that this same app was saying I only had 340mb of RAM free...
This seemed a bit strange, considering this tablet has 3GB of RAM on board, and I'm not really running anything at the moment.
I went into the storage setting page, and looked at running processes, and it says that I am using 2.5GB of my RAM.
but... if I add up all the ram usage on all the running processes, it only adds up to about 500mb....
So what is using up the other 2gb?
If anyone has any suggestions, it'd be nice, as at the moment it seems I only have 1gb of usable RAM in this device...
EDIT:
Nevermind, I think I solved it... sort of. I found that the ram clearing button is in a different place than I remember, and I have managed to clear out some more space... though even after a full reset 1.5gb of ram is immediately being used. Seems a lot.
Though this is a stock rom etc so I suspect thats normal.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You probably aren't using all 2.5GB for actual running programs.
Windows 7 does a great job of managing money. If it has any unused memory it will hold often used programs or data in memory in case it's needed. If a running program needs that memory it's quickly shifted. Otherwise when you reopen that program you recently closed, it may load quickly from memory rather than from the drive. I suspect Android does things similar.
Modern systems programmers consider "free" memory to be wasted, so they put it to the best use they can anticipate. That gives you the benefit of all memory as often as possible. If they only allowed the memory to be used for what's needed right now, your Note would only have about 1 GB memory, and would be considerably slower.
It's a little like having the cook wash your car while waiting three hours for the turkey to cook. You get both the turkey and the car wash.
jnichols2 said:
You probably aren't using all 2.5GB for actual running programs.
Windows 7 does a great job of managing money. If it has any unused memory it will hold often used programs or data in memory in case it's needed. If a running program needs that memory it's quickly shifted. Otherwise when you reopen that program you recently closed, it may load quickly from memory rather than from the drive. I suspect Android does things similar.
Modern systems programmers consider "free" memory to be wasted, so they put it to the best use they can anticipate. That gives you the benefit of all memory as often as possible. If they only allowed the memory to be used for what's needed right now, your Note would only have about 1 GB memory, and would be considerably slower.
It's a little like having the cook wash your car while waiting three hours for the turkey to cook. You get both the turkey and the car wash.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm guessing you mean android, not windows 7
Though I imagine both do the same thing lol
nirurin said:
I'm guessing you mean android, not windows 7
Though I imagine both do the same thing lol
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I used Windows 7 as an example because I know how it works. Like you, I imagine Android 4.3 does the same thing.
I was wondering about this as well. On my Note 2, when I clean the ram, it will go to 480-500 / 1.75g on this tab, ext I could get is 1.33/2.75.......
I went through and turned off a lot of the apps, it helped free up a little bit.
Does anyone have a list of the apps that are safe to turn off?
:beer:
Sent from my SM-P600 using Xparent Cyan Tapatalk 2
I have LTE version with Snapdragon and when I start the tablet, it uses about 890MB of 2,35GB available (yes, it has 3GB RAM, but graphic processor uses some of this RAM)... When it loads all apps to RAM (about 50 of them, we know android do this) and I start few apps(FB, Gmail, Chrome, Hangouts for example), I still use only about 1,3GB of RAM... So almost 1GB is still free
In Android having too much free ram is not a good thing. Let your apps use it, you don't have to worry about not having enough ram, OS manages it well for you.
ddavtian said:
In Android having too much free ram is not a good thing. Let your apps use it, you don't have to worry about not having enough ram, OS manages it well for you.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
+1
Android is a mobile OS which means that it can backup and restore not needed apps if necessary and the 3GB are only the runtime memory beside this it can use the whole internal memory for "running" apps. So long Android got enough memory it holds all apps in memory which speed up the whole device. Therefore it is positive that the Note use his whole 3GB memory and don't think that killing apps or free memory will be a good idea. It will slow your device and produce lags.
ddavtian said:
In Android having too much free ram is not a good thing. Let your apps use it, you don't have to worry about not having enough ram, OS manages it well for you.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Elim said:
+1
Android is a mobile OS which means that it can backup and restore not needed apps if necessary and the 3GB are only the runtime memory beside this it can use the whole internal memory for "running" apps. So long Android got enough memory it holds all apps in memory which speed up the whole device. Therefore it is positive that the Note use his whole 3GB memory and don't think that killing apps or free memory will be a good idea. It will slow your device and produce lags.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
They are both right. Android is based on linux. Linux uses ram very effectively to cache apps and data to speed up your system. When something needs ram it removes a different app or data from the ram to keep moving. It works totally different from Windows. Check out this article.
http://www.androidcentral.com/ram-what-it-how-its-used-and-why-you-shouldnt-care
Every day since Android came out someone asks this question somewhere... Is Google offline?
Sent from my SM-P605 using XDA Premium HD app
If you want to change how your ram is managed, and you have root, you can use the v6 supercharger or a simple minfree setting app. V6 is in the developer section of the general android forum on this site. I've found that m ram fills up from cached apps. V6 will let you auto clear however often you want.