Develop Bugs

Low internal memory

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.

Ramdisk/swap

What are the possibilities of using our 2gb of ddr program storage and re allocating it as system ram?
Even if it isn't pure flash (slow speed) I imagine it would be better then nothing, we could always store programs on the sdcard.
Sent from my GT-I9000 using XDA App

android53 said:
What are the possibilities of using our 2gb of ddr program storage and re allocating it as system ram?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
very good, this post actually explains how to make a swap file (on /cache which is fast nand!).
if you want a swap partition you could a) use part of the 2gb /data partition for a new swap partition which you create in a project-voodoo like manner -> not very easy to do as you would have to repartition /data before boot OR b) just make a 2nd partition on your external sd card to swap on. a lot of people (me included) actually did this with their htc magic.
but to be honest i don't think that you will gain any speed improvements with this, on the contrary your system will be slower an more laggy... i found swap even worse on the magic with ~90mb of user-available-ram. if you want to try it nevertheless, it think the swap file on /cache would be a good start!

jodue said:
very good, this post actually explains how to make a swap file (on /cache which is fast nand!).
if you want a swap partition you could a) use part of the 2gb /data partition for a new swap partition which you create in a project-voodoo like manner -> not very easy to do as you would have to repartition /data before boot OR b) just make a 2nd partition on your external sd card to swap on. a lot of people (me included) actually did this with their htc magic.
but to be honest i don't think that you will gain any speed improvements with this, on the contrary your system will be slower an more laggy... i found swap even worse on the magic with ~90mb of user-available-ram. if you want to try it nevertheless, it think the swap file on /cache would be a good start!
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Click to collapse
If we go for b, will the sgs detect and use the swap partition or do we need to do something else.. I still use my htc magic along side my sgs
Sent from my GT-I9000 using XDA App

i have tried using a swap file, but i didnt c any improvements, and the usage was about 500kb only

I recall that on liquid we managed to use a ramzswap module, which fakes a zipped swap partition in ram. It causes cpu to work a bit more, but it was still efficient.

Elvoski said:
If we go for b, will the sgs detect and use the swap partition or do we need to do something else.. I still use my htc magic along side my sgs
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
you would have to repartition our external sd to have a second (linux swap) partition.
then use mkswap to set the partition up and after that call swapon. swapon has to be redone every time you restart but you could place it in a playlogos1 script to automate that.
captive said:
I recall that on liquid we managed to use a ramzswap module, which fakes a zipped swap partition in ram. It causes cpu to work a bit more, but it was still efficient.
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Click to collapse
compcache?! ... i guess this would also be a good trade off for our galaxy s because the cpu is definitely not the bottleneck here...
btw. a good read about swap & compcache from the cyanogenmod wiki: swap & compcache

android53 said:
What are the possibilities of using our 2gb of ddr program storage and re allocating it as system ram?
Sent from my GT-I9000 using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Bad, bery bad idea, MoviNand is not in any way releated to DDR. It's waaaay slower.
Also, RAM is designed for virtually unlimited data read/write counts.
NAND memory is not.
What would be the benefit of using swap space? Nothing. Data is being read/written in filesystem in the end. No improvement in performance. (It could be seriously degraded).
This behavior is totally against Android core design principles. Android doesnt use swap because it doesnt need to. Programs not fitting into "RAM" are being closed with their state remembered. When program is re-launched it is loaded from filesystem and its state is being restored.
If we had "swap" space, it would become really messy. Just imagine:
System wants to close program X, resident in swap, it needs to:
- restore program from swap to RAM (talk about additional ram needed)
- close program, resulting writing state to FS.

i was talking about this sort of thing with Ryza and Voodoo guy they said it was too much work
i'm forward with the idea of using a Swap drive in RAM or external SD
to prevent over usage on the internal SD

This means external SD would need to be powered up at all times -> battery drain (it is present with APPS2SD - or whatever this name was)

Wuld this mean that we would have extra ram available for running apps...like SGS task manager will show more than 311Mb RAM ?
If this is the case then I am very interestied, since I don't care about speed so much. I just need to run an app that currently can not run due to out-off-memmory (needs 130Mb of RAM) for pure presentation purposes

There is a app in market called swapper2 which can make use of the swap partition or creates a swap file for use. I had been using this app since my HTC MAGIC and now on SGS.
I'm currently using swap partition that had been created earlier in my class 6 SDCard. Works on both eclair or froyo kernels on SGS. So far I am not complaining, with swappiness 20, there is not much of memory hog or lag due to opening too many apps or single memory hogging apps (like flash on browser) on my XXJPK, the swap memory gets allocated and deallocated as you can tell from the swapper info feature.
But the battery effects is something to think about though, sdcards are cheap so I don't mind sacrificing it. The other way is to create a swap file on the rfs and use it if you value your sdcard. The screenshot provided is a normal usage of my device with a few apps running at background (Still gonna be 300+ RAM, nothing magical about it though) and I had also used minfree tweak on the kernel.
You can try and see if it helps in terms of performance for a few days. I cant vouch for the swapper a lot as I'm using it myself - I am more uncomfortable without it though. What Xan said does makes sense but there are rare times when the things that doesn't makes sense gives us surprises.
A good read up and comments from people who had tried and used it in different scenarios...
http://zerocredibility.wordpress.com/2009/08/24/why-android-swap-doesnt-make-sense/
Sent from my GT-I9000 using Tapatalk

[Q] Ram doesn't add up? (Not the usual question)

Hello,
So I just recently got my Nexus, and I'm really really loving it. I had a question about the RAM. I'm on stock un-rooted and I noticed I had a little less that 700 MB ram. I know that's for system or gpu or whatever so I'm ok with that.
What I'm confused about is, I'm currently using 400 MB of it. If I combine the totals from the "Running Apps" section plus what is in the "Cached" section, it doesn't come close to the total 400MB being used.
So where is the extra Ram being used from? How can I free some of it up?
I've been reading that task managers are a no-no for ICS, so I'm more curious about which apps are killing my ram.
Thanks in advance

ellimistx99 said:
How can I free some of it up?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Why would you want to?
killing my ram.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Killing it how? Using it to make you phone react faster?

beren28 said:
Why would you want to?
Killing it how? Using it to make you phone react faster?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well sure in theory make the phone run faster. I imagine having more free ram available to be used in the cached application section and not the "running application section" will help make apps load quicker too. My friend had a desire and the amount of ram she had did drastically effect her phone performance.
But also because I'm curious about where is that extra 200 or so MB of ram is being used from?

Linux shares ram within apps/processes in a very complex way where even the experts have difficulty explaining exact tallies on ram levels. This is why different apps report different free ram values like os monitor vs system panel vs stock settings etc. So i wouldnt wprry about how android OS shows your ram value in settings, its not gonna add up and its a tricky question to ask.

RogerPodacter said:
Linux shares ram within apps/processes in a very complex way where even the experts have difficulty explaining exact tallies on ram levels. This is why different apps report different free ram values like os monitor vs system panel vs stock settings etc. So i wouldnt wprry about how android OS shows your ram value in settings, its not gonna add up and its a tricky question to ask.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hmm alright. So basically it's not something I should worry about? It's quite a large discrepancy. I guess I'll worry about it once I have errors that are "low ram" or something to that effect.
Thanks anyway

It's the discussion like there was in the galaxy s forum. The not displayed ram is used by the kernel it self and by the GPU. And besides it's a good thing to have a full ram in Android, because then many apps are pre loaded in the ram and can start faster this way.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using XDA

ellimistx99 said:
Hmm alright. So basically it's not something I should worry about? It's quite a large discrepancy. I guess I'll worry about it once I have errors that are "low ram" or something to that effect.
Thanks anyway
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Its always been like this on my android phones, i wouldnt worry. For example if you kill all current apps, you wont see free ram increase at the exact level of the total of all closed apps. Too much overlap and ram page sharing i think.

Don't worry about it. Some ROMs e. the stock ROM, don't have a seperate RAMDisk.
So, basicly, the ROM dumps some cached processes on to the RAM directly "clogging" it. If you however, have a custom ROM, eg. CynagonMod, the system uses half of the RAM it would use as a stock ROM, because cm uses a RAMDisk, which uses a minimal amount of space, on the device's memory.
But, there's absolutley nothing to worry about
Enjoy the phone and leave the RAM, as it is

Can anyone here tell me how to partition my sd card to create 1 ext4 partition to increase internal memry, 1 simple fat partition for daily use, and most importantly gto create 1 swap partition to increase my RAM and how to use it as RAM in galaxy fit ... Plz provide me a tutorial
Sent from my GT-S5670 using XDA

abhinav2196 said:
Can anyone here tell me how to partition my sd card to create 1 ext4 partition to increase internal memry, 1 simple fat partition for daily use, and most importantly gto create 1 swap partition to increase my RAM and how to use it as RAM in galaxy fit ... Plz provide me a tutorial
Sent from my GT-S5670 using XDA
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The Galaxy Nexus doesn't have an SDcard. You can't partition it up like that.
Also, think you're in the wrong forum.

[Q] How much RAM do you have for apps?

I'm asking because I'm frequently out of RAM, causing extreme lags and launcher reboots. I know the CPU reserves 300MB, leaving 700MB, but how much do ROMs typically occupy? Any recommendation for leaner ROMs? Or perhaps there are modifications to enable more aggressive task killing (non-background tasks)?

843 said:
I'm asking because I'm frequently out of RAM, causing extreme lags and launcher reboots. I know the CPU reserves 300MB, leaving 700MB, but how much do ROMs typically occupy? Any recommendation for leaner ROMs? Or perhaps there are modifications to enable more aggressive task killing (non-background tasks)?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Run out of RAM? never again with this Mod
Gnex Supported! :good::good::good:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2145133

How would that work since my GNex doesn't have an SD card? Isn't everything on the same internal memory?

843 said:
How would that work since my GNex doesn't have an SD card? Isn't everything on the same internal memory?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
First of all, that mod puts it in /system, /data and/or /cache. So it doesn't even try to use the sd card regardless.
Second, I just thought i would try it out and it throws out an error "incompatible with your device Galaxy Nexus (toro).
I figured maybe i would give swapper 2 a go again. It hasn't been updated in ages, but it seems to work. You can leave it on sdcard (which is just internal memory anyway) or change the directory to any you want. I changed mine to /cache since my sdcard is kind of full. Can even change the swapiness within the app. Only downside is the limit for it is 256mb. So far it seems to be working properly on Verizon Galaxy Nexus stock, rooted, 4.1.1 with lean kernel.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

I have done some tinkering. What seems to work for me is limiting background processes to 4 or less. These turn out to be cached processes which keep opened apps open. They eat up your remaining RAM and should ideally be removed if an app you're trying to run demands it. However, the removal process causes significant lag, possibly due to the slow internal memory the GNex has.

I'm running CM10 (4.1.2), and I have 245MB free right now. It has gone down to as low as 150MB, but rarely below. When using 4.2.2 based roms, I get as low as 40-50MB, which causes problems. I don't have high hopes for 4.3 right now.

[Q] SD Card Partition SM-T800

Hey,
So, I've looked around and only found non-product specific related threads about sdcard partioning.
I would like know if it's worth doing a swap partition and anything else on the stock rom of the sm-T800.
Advice please.

ivyhole said:
Hey,
So, I've looked around and only found non-product specific related threads about sdcard partioning.
I would like know if it's worth doing a swap partition and anything else on the stock rom of the sm-T800.
Advice please.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Forget about creating a swap partition on your sd card. This device has 3gb of fast ram and has no need of a swap partition on the sd card. It's more likely to hinder and slow the device than benefit.
Not only that root will be needed.

ashyx said:
Forget about creating a swap partition on your sd card. This device has 3gb of fast ram and has no need of a swap partition on the sd card. It's more likely to hinder and slow the device than benefit.
Not only that root will be needed.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Cannot agree with this statement "This device has 3gb of fast ram and has no need of a swap partition on the sd card. "
The following statement maybe true " It's more likely to hinder and slow the device than benefit." But we need to test this first before we make claims.
Both statements are unsubstantiated without any metrics to support them. It's like saying "your computer has 3gb of fast RAM and has no need of ...." - how do we judge what "fast RAM" is, how much does "3gb" get you, what applications you run most often and how they perform, how much killing and kicking the OS does because it keeps running low on memory and follows an aggressive scheduler, and so on.
My personal experience is that both the OS and applications are written to expect very low levels of RAM and both the OS and the applications unload their data as soon as they can, resulting in unnecessary "reloading" over the internet, which further implies increased internet data usage, which, in some countries, eg Europe, we still pay for, dearly.
It is not funny at all when I travel abroad and take my tablet with me, enable Roaming only for a second to say check emails and view a few web pages (like booking.com trying to view / book a hotel room), and then switching Roaming off, however when I go back to read those pages 50% of the time they are gone! It seems that anything more than 3-4 tabs on the browser and they will go. Or maybe I should not have opened that speadsheet or whatever it was that I did and I cannot remember, maybe I looked at it the wrong way.
So let's find a way to improve this - we cannot increase the onboard RAM, but maybe since SD Cards are replaceable and cheap, we could give it a bit more RAM to play with, not sure how well that would work. There is a relevant thread hereabouts with instructions of how to do just that (if I could find it)