Is There an App That Can Maintain Minimum Memory?

[Fabrian]

What I'm looking for is an app that can just set what the minimum memory available is. For example, I want there to be no less than, say, 80MB available instead of the OS letting it drop down to the 30's or 40's.

Ya, I see that Android kills off some apps of less importance and I usually use Advanced Task Killer to end apps that don't need to be running. I just want to spend less time managing it. I know I don't *have to* really worry about what my free memory is, but I do notice a choke here and there on my DX if there's tons of stuff running in the background and available memory is down to 40 megs or so.

I use Launcher Pro because I can't stand stuttery transitions, and LP takes care of that. Even so, I sometimes still have to go and manually kill apps that don't need to be running as well as clear cache ( CacheMate).

If I were able to set a minimum memory amount, I think I'd be pretty well happy.

 

[traindrvr63]

Check into a app called "MemoryUp pro....cost is $10 but so far it's working out pretty good so far.

 

[LordBlackmore]

You're only making things worse by circumventing android's memory management. The operating system already has a good, robust and effective method for managing processes and memory and people are better off letting it do it's job.

By increasing an app or processes working set (memory it uses) manually, you're reducing the amount of resources available for other processes and apps. And if you fiddle with the wrong thing, you'll start having problems.

Dump the task killer, because it does more harm than good by killing things that don't need to be killed forcing the OS to restart things.

I know people feel the need to endlessly tinker, but unless you really know what's going on under the hood, it's best to leave the OS in charge.

 

[icebike]

I agree with LordBlackmore.

Stop worrying about memory. Its the same thing I have to tell windows users as they migrate to Linux.

The device manages memory better than you can. Any memory not in use is wasted memory. Linux/Android is very very good at doing this.

If you want to spend less time managing it, then the best recommendation is to leave it alone, let the OS it do its job.

And I could make a good case for you to stop running Advanced Task killer too. Maybe your stuttery performance is because the OS has to restart those things you are killing off?

 

[Fabrian]

I agree about task killers for those who are killing off app that restart, however, I only kill off apps that don't need to be running such as the weather channel, image gallery, pandora, etc..., not stuff that will continually restart.

I will say that I really didn't know how "good" the OS is at managing memory. All I know is I don't like the way it runs when it's down to 30 or 40 megs.

 

[dvader]

with the droid x this isnt the case (at least in my experience)
when the phone hits below ~55mb of memory it slows down big time.
this is repeatable among my 2 phones and others that i have read about.

 

[Rockee]

Autokiller does this. Its not a task killer so to speak. Check it out.

What I'm looking for is an app that can just set what the minimum memory available is. For example, I want there to be no less than, say, 80MB available instead of the OS letting it drop down to the 30's or 40's.

Ya, I see that Android kills off some apps of less importance and I usually use Advanced Task Killer to end apps that don't need to be running. I just want to spend less time managing it. I know I don't *have to* really worry about what my free memory is, but I do notice a choke here and there on my DX if there's tons of stuff running in the background and available memory is down to 40 megs or so.

I use Launcher Pro because I can't stand stuttery transitions, and LP takes care of that. Even so, I sometimes still have to go and manually kill apps that don't need to be running as well as clear cache ( CacheMate).

If I were able to set a minimum memory amount, I think I'd be pretty well happy.

Sent from my DROIDX using Tapatalk

 

[icebike]

with the droid x this isnt the case (at least in my experience)
when the phone hits below ~55mb of memory it slows down big time.
this is repeatable among my 2 phones and others that i have read about.

Where is this memory reading you are reporting?

 

[jdbower]

Out of curiosity, have you considered that leaving 80MB of memory on the phone in forbidden territory effectively means you bought a phone with 432MB instead of 512MB of memory? Unused memory is wasted memory IMO.

 

[greydarrah]

As someone else mentioned here, AutoKiller is what you're looking for. It does require root access. It's not a task killer, it just lets you set whatever the minimum amount of free memory you want the phone to keep, passes that to the android Os and lets the OS decide what processes it should kill to make it happen. Unlike ATK, the OS knows what processes are ok to kill.

 

[Fabrian]

Where is this memory reading you are reporting?

Advanced Task Killer and SystemPanel report the same available memory.

Out of curiosity, have you considered that leaving 80MB of memory on the phone in forbidden territory effectively means you bought a phone with 432MB instead of 512MB of memory? Unused memory is wasted memory IMO.

Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't think this is the solution I was looking for.

Autokiller does this. Its not a task killer so to speak. Check it out.

As someone else mentioned here, AutoKiller is what you're looking for. It does require root access. It's not a task killer, it just lets you set whatever the minimum amount of free memory you want the phone to keep, passes that to the android Os and lets the OS decide what processes it should kill to make it happen. Unlike ATK, the OS knows what processes are ok to kill.

Ok, thanks, I'll give it a try


I know there are people that are for/anti task killers. Honestly, I don't know as much about Unix based OS's as I'd like (hopefully one day I'll get on that) and I don't really know the fundamentals of why it supposedly manages memory so well.

There are two reason I use a task killer:

1. There are apps that don't quit after use that use cpu cycle time even though there's no need for it to be running once I'm done with it. This does effect performance to some degree, but ultimately it effects battery life. Don't misunderstand my intention here, I do exclude most of the apps that are and should be running.

2. Available memory left for the apps that are running and need to to utilize it and availability of cache.

Now, if I've totally missed the boat here, then feel free to educate me. I know a lot about a lot things, but I certainly don't know everything.

Thanks for the help thus far.

 

[jdbower]

Linux process management is very good. Essentially a process has a "sleep" mode where it exists, but uses up next to no resources. I have 197 processes running on my computer right now and 9 of them are using 1% or more of my CPU and my total utilization is 13%.

Linux memory management is also very good and it relies on free memory to create cache to speed things up. On my desktop I've got 31% in use by applications (mostly Chrome), 66% in use as cache and the remaining 3% is free. When an application needs memory, the low-hit cache is instantly swapped out for application memory in the background.

It's a very different world than Blackberry where memory and storage are intertwined and there's no point in swapping between the two.

What I have found the "need" for is a manual task killer. OS Monitor will display things like processor utilization and memory usage for individual apps. When a rogue app goes berserk and steals a ton of CPU cycles or memory needlessly I use OS Monitor to kill it. But I don't want to set arbitrary limits on the memory usage since that's not really a driving factor for performance and I don't want to limit applications to a certain CPU usage because sometimes they need it. Most of the time the OS will detect these berserk applications and kill them for me, but sometimes I'm not patient enough to wait

Hope this helps - and that it's valid for Android as well as Linux!

 

[bloodoak]

To answer your question, minfreemanager will do this if you are rooted. But I suggest reading the guide here on android central before using it.

And yes linux manages memory well, however both sense and motorola get very sluggish when running under 40 mb of memory.

Sent from my DROIDX using Tapatalk