Bionic slow (RAM < 20MB Free?)

[tjfritton]

I've had this problem with my Bionic for a while now. Basically, my phone gets really really slow sometimes. Like to the point where I hit a button (like say, Home) and it takes my phone 5, 10, sometimes 20 seconds to react to it. Rebooting doesn't seem to help. A battery pull seems to make things work, but only for like a day or so. I'm now on stock JB, but this was happening before when I had stock ICS.

When I check my running apps, I don't see anything too unusual. But I do notice that my amount of free RAM is usually very low, sometimes even in the teens. I understand that using a lot of RAM isn't a bad thing, but when it's that low, I'm concerned that there's not enough room to start up other apps, so my phone is maybe spending time closing apps to make room to open something else.

My running apps list, of course, doesn't really show anything really hogging my RAM.

I tried killing the few widgets that I use to see if that helped. No luck.

When I do the battery pull, my free RAM starts out around 200MB and things seem to run smoothly. But over the course of the next day or so, my free RAM continues to shrink and my phone continues to get slower and slower.

Any idea what could be causing my problems?

Thanks.

 

[danlayman]

a few things that will help: Go into settings, developer options and check "at most 3 process running", download "fast reboot" app which will essentially recover your leaked ram in a few seconds, and maybe a program like 1-tap cache cleaner.

If you want to get really aggressive you can check "Don't keep activities after leaving them" in the settings /developer options mode. This will really help your ram but as soon as you leave something like your music player to go to the internet for example your music player will stop.

The first three things listed won't affect the performance of your phone in any way and make things much easier to keep running smoothly. If you don't limit the number of processes running in the background you can lose RAM REAL fast.

 

[dtbarabus]

Thanks for the tips. I had the same issues and your tips helped.

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using Android Central Forums

 

[tjfritton]

Thanks for the ideas. I had previously tried the Fast Reboot app and didn't see a difference. I will try the Cache Cleaner and the running process limit the next time my RAM gets eaten up. Right now it seems it's holding around 150MB free and the phone is working pretty well. I'm sure within the next day or so I'll see it lagging.

I'll avoid the "Don't Keep Activities" option though. That wouldn't make things fun when I'm bouncing around between apps.

Any idea why this would be happening to me in the first place? Plenty of people (including my wife) have the Bionic and have lots of free RAM. I don't feel like I have too many apps that would be running around in the background hogging my RAM. Maybe Tasker, Widgetsoid, and a battery widget, but that's about it. Nothing real exciting.

Again, thanks for your help.

 

[Groid]

I have 21.7 Mb free according to Titanium backup and have no noticeable lag. The limit background processes has to be selected after every reboot. I do have the transition animations set to 'off'. I clear cache in recovery once in a while and do a dalvik cleanup in Titanium on occasion.

 

[danlayman]

I have 21.7 Mb free according to Titanium backup and have no noticeable lag. The limit background processes has to be selected after every reboot. I do have the transition animations set to 'off'. I clear cache in recovery once in a while and do a dalvik cleanup in Titanium on occasion.

Wow, I'm surprised you're running smoothly at that level of free RAM. Once I get below 100MB I get laggy. In the old Blackberry days it used to be common to get under 5 MB free RAM lol.

 

[Syounger64]

This was very helpful to me too but I'm never going to be satisfied with this phone as it lags too often. Its a shame this phone never did live up to its promise and that's the reason im looking to dump this phone for a Note 2 or something similar.

 

[conikay]

I can't find "DEVELOPER OPTIONS" on my Samsung Galaxy s Fascinate (yes, this is an older cell) I read that is I go to "ABOUT PHONE" and BUILD NUMBER, hit that 10 plus times and Dev opts would come up.......but no. my settings-apps-running services averages at 15-20 mb available....and has gone to zero. I have CLEAN MASTER, BATTERY DR., ONE TAP CM. I SPEND HOURS PER DAY DOING CLEANS. I HAVE ADVANCED TASK KILLER. NOTHING HELPS. CAN YOU PLEASE HELP ME??