RAM

[sulasno]

Ram usage should not exceed 75% of available Ram so that the phone will not lag

How true is the statement?

 

[hallux]

One of the misconceptions about RAM is that having more free must mean the phone will be faster. The opposite is true though. The more your device uses RAM, the FASTER it will be as more stuff is available in the location that is accessed faster. Sure - if what you're looking to use/do is not cached in RAM it's going to load slower if space needs to be freed up, but modern OS's are usually pretty good at managing memory on their own and making it so there is little reason to use memory cleaner apps (despite what those developers want you to believe).

Here's a guide posted in another section - https://forums.androidcentral.com/a...ow-tos/380592-guide-ram-android-new-post.html
Also a "got lag?" guide in the same section - https://forums.androidcentral.com/ambassador-guides-tips-how-tos/845886-got-lag-new-post.html

 

[Rukbat]

Windows and Linux (and probably Mac, although I haven't used one in years) have to swap a running program to disk if there's not enough space to run the program you want running.

Android works differently. Apps have to constantly store their current state, so if Android needs the space a background app is taking up, it just kills the app. That takes a few nanoseconds. When you bring that app to the foreground again, it continues on from where it was. So using 95% of RAM isn't going to slow Android down much, where it would bring another OS to its knees.

 

[sulasno]

With a 3gb ram device, the apps take a while to respond when ram is 250mb. Maybe best to have at least 10% ram free

 

[Gayle Lynn]

Hasn't been true for ages.

A small snippet should always be in RAM.

A phone using high speed UFS 2.x storage (500+ MB/sec) also helps.

Memory management along with the 6GB in Note 8 (7.1.1 helps) means you can be opening 100 apps and not lag.

 

[sulasno]

Finally found a solution to the RAM problem. The cause could be any app that decides to run amok and not releasing the RAM, and the solution would be rebooting the device

 

[Rukbat]

That's called a memory leak - the app requests some amount of RAM to use for something, but the request is in a loop, and the "developer" releases the RAM after the loop ends, so the app is constantly asking for more RAM (which should eventually cause that one app to crash, but the RAM is never released (which is why rebooting fixes it).

And considering what "develops" apps these days, I can definitely believe that memory leaks are a problem - they have been at least since Microsoft released its first C compiler - back in the 80s? BASIC interpreters didn't normally run anything that explicitly allocated RAM (but boy, could you do things if you knew how to), and assembly programmers knew to not keep allocating the same RAM amoumt (but additional RAM, not the same RAM) over and over.

But aside from memory leaks, using 95% of RAM in Android, then running an app that needs 20% of it, isn't a problem. One or more apps get killed while that new app runs, then they're loaded back as soon as the user "uses" the app again.

Dianne Hackborn, an Android developer (not someone who develops apps, someone who develops Android) wrote an article about it in 2010 - Multitasking the Android Way. (Careful, when she says "memory" she's not referring to storage.)

 

[sulasno]

Maybe installing a swap file could help?

 

[Rukbat]

Except that Android doesn't use swap files. (Read the article I linked to if you want to know why. It's not an oversight, it's deliberate. It would help if it did - help to slow the phone to a crawl.)

 

[sulasno]

Will this work?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.swapit.expander.de