is it the ram or the cpu? because all these phones seem to have about the same processor speed yet there's a big difference in speeds. would it be ram? i'm running with 1 gig ram right now and when i play the sims free play it lags so much that most of the game time is because i'm waiting for the action to kick in. it literally freezes for about 5 seconds before and after EVERY action. will having more ram like in the S3 make that lag go away?
Before any computer experts jump on me for this, I'm going to try to simplify this into layman's terms... RAM is simply the amount of space available to store data for active tasks -- think of it as the "short term memory" of the computer, or in this case smart phone. The hard drive where you store your files for future use is then the "long term memory". RAM should be configured to be very quickly accessible, and is generally being constantly over-written as new tasks are performed. The CPU however, is the actual brains of the computer -- where the tasks are actually processed.
In short, both RAM and CPU can be determining factors when it comes to to system speed. Ultimately, your system can't run any faster than the processor can handle, but if you're short on RAM, then that can have a direct effect on how fasts tasks can be processed by the CPU. On top of all that, most applications require access to files in HD storage, so the speed of HDDs can effect the relative speed that a program runs as well. Then, you also have to factor the overall quality of the code written for the application itself. If the code isn't written to use system resources efficiently, that can cause it to run slower than expected.
On top of the listed "speed" for CPUs, there's also the quantity of CPUs available to run processes. The more processing cores you have, theoretically the more simultaneous tasks a system can perform at once.
Bottom line? There's no simple answer to the question of why one particular app may lag or run slowly. The S3 is one of the best phones on the market right now, in terms of specs of RAM and CPU...so if you find an app lags on it, then chances are (1) it's either poorly written, (2) it's designed to use un-realistic amounts of resources to run on a smart phone or (3) there's something else running on your phone consuming too many resources to allow the app in question to run properly.
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