Memory Question

[sleeping giant]

So I am still a Droid X noob and I was just wondering why whenever I open up Advanced Task Killer, I always see less than ~30MB in available memory. I dont have any apps besides social networking installed and i barely have any widgets on any of the 7 screens.

Where's all my memory going? Out of 512MB I'm always left with less than 30 every hour

PS
As I've read in other threads, a factory reset is recommended but someone else linked a thread on another forum stating that it is not recommended because I will not be able to gain access to VZW again (or something like that)

thanks in advance

 

[ottscay]

You are thinking of memory usage wrong (did you come from a BB like myself?). BB's and other phones have memory leaks, and when the memory is gone the phone may slow to a crawl. Android manages memory itself, and many programs may share data or parts of their APIs. That means that the OS will turn things on itself when it needs them, but it also means it will shut processes down and reclaim that memory when needed. Now, that can mean occasional slowdowns if you were say streaming video for a while and then want to do something else, as the OS will be managing the memory for a few seconds, but it's only a brief period of time (a couple seconds) while it adapts and away the phone speeds.

So you really don't need to worry about it, and frankly if you're a "Droid X newb" you shouldn't worry about it. ATK can cause more problems than it solves unless it's used very carefully (i.e. if you shut down a program because you don't think it should be open, but the OS needs it, then it will just have to reopen the program, which slows the phone down and makes battery life worse).

So stop watching your memory, IMO uninstall ATK altogether (I have) and enjoy.

 

[sleeping giant]

oh i see, yes I did come from BB as well (BBTour)

thank you for that explanation, really helped alot

 

[ottscay]

I totally understand. I spent the first two days obsessively managing the memory on my X, but I read up on some of the threads here (there's a sticky on task killers in the forums) and some other places, took a deep breath and uninstalled it to see how the phone would perform...and it performed exactly the same. The real benefit (to me) was that I was able to relax and stop thinking about it. It was surprising how much of a relief that was after having to micro-manage the memory on my Storm.

 

[DaRkL3AD3R]

While I don't use a task killer app or anything, I will go ahead and close down apps that I KNOW don't need to be loaded up in the background every once in awhile. I have every console emulator on the market installed, along with pandora and dolphin browser HD. If I boot up my phone and lets say browse the web on dolphin, 30 minutes later check what processes are running under "Settings->Applications->Manage Applications->Filter Running only" I find that ALL of my emulators are loaded up in the background, along with pandora and a bunch of other things. Now I know why it does this, its so if I do decide in the future I want to open these apps, they're already open and thus theres no load time, but truthfully what are we talking here, 2 seconds of load time being saved?

I'd rather my system loaded apps and data as it needed it than be playing a game and randomly have the system lag out while it closes off/loads up another app into data. If you've seen a small spike in performance, especially while gaming where the framerate hiccups and the sound gets distorted: this is whats going on. Its rather annoying and I wish I could disable this prefetch like memory management but alas I can't