# Ram



## RandomSnapple (Aug 23, 2011)

Ok, so everyone who has a Droid Charge knows how little ram this phone has. At most, i only have 130 mb of free ram, does anyone know where the rest of the ram is being used? Is there any way to free up more ram or anything? I love this phone, but the hardware it comes with kinda sucks.


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## rand4ll (Aug 20, 2011)

128mb are dedicated to graphics processing while what you can see used is just system processes...


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## juiced718 (Aug 20, 2011)

Though we will never have more than say.. 140-160 mb free at any given point, this mod has really given me a consistent amount of RAM try it out... its good for any rom on android device

http://rootzwiki.com/showthread.php?4193-HOW-TO-SCRIPT-V6-SuperCharger-Loopy-Smoothness-amp-More


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## neyenlives (Aug 5, 2011)

RandomSnapple said:


> Ok, so everyone who has a Droid Charge knows how little ram this phone has. At most, i only have 130 mb of free ram, does anyone know where the rest of the ram is being used? Is there any way to free up more ram or anything? I love this phone, but the hardware it comes with kinda sucks.


You should forget you ever knew about it. I never look at the free ram, i never have a problem. I have never had my phone act weird where i was like "damn if only i had more free ram". The mentality reminds me of the idiots back in the Windows XP days who obsessed over having as much free memory as possible........without realizing that free memory doesnt do shit. You may as well take it out of your computer and use it for a paperweight. I am a flashaholic and have used pretty much every rom and kernel for the fascinate and the charge and have never run out of memory or even cared to look at it.


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## shrike1978 (Sep 2, 2011)

neyenlives said:


> You should forget you ever knew about it. I never look at the free ram, i never have a problem. I have never had my phone act weird where i was like "damn if only i had more free ram". The mentality reminds me of the idiots back in the Windows XP days who obsessed over having as much free memory as possible........without realizing that free memory doesnt do shit. You may as well take it out of your computer and use it for a paperweight. I am a flashaholic and have used pretty much every rom and kernel for the fascinate and the charge and have never run out of memory or even cared to look at it.


+1

I use V6, but I don't use high free memory settings. Balanced 3 or Aggressive 1 are perfect for this phone. On a mobile device, free RAM is wasted RAM. You need *some* free for the cache, but beyond that, maintaining too much free RAM will cause programs to terminate prematurely, and will prevent the OS from being able to hold things in memory for faster startup, or, even worse, cause the OS to close things you want to keep open, like navigation, audio player, web browser, ect.

Bottom line, forget what you know about memory from the PC world. The mobile phone world and the Linux world are different places...and Android is both of those.


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## CraigL (Jun 17, 2011)

Dont get bent out of shape about free ram. Android is designed to run with it's ram mostly full, and only free things from ram when the ram is needed.

At the moment the amount of ram on the Charge is plenty for just about any user.

Further reading (it's in regards to task killers but explains very well how Android uses ram): http://geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-using-a-task-killer-with-android/


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## Mrmidnight (Aug 19, 2011)

"CraigL said:


> Dont get bent out of shape about free ram. Android is designed to run with it's ram mostly full, and only free things from ram when the ram is needed.
> 
> At the moment the amount of ram on the Charge is plenty for just about any user.
> 
> Further reading (it's in regards to task killers but explains very well how Android uses ram): http://geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-using-a-task-killer-with-android/


I have tried to explain this point to people at work and not a soul believes me. Probably because they know how to log into facebook and how to send a text message.


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## Cruiserdude (Jun 23, 2011)

I see complaints like this alot, and I really don't get it. We have 512mb, how is that not alot? As others have stated, free ram is wasted ram, and it uses the same amount of power whether it's in use or not. So you'd get shorter battery life, with no tangible benefits. This is also DDR2 ram, unlike most other Galaxy S devices, so it's more power efficient and operates more quickly when loading things up, this phone is simply not weak in the ram department.

Keep in mind that the Linux kernel is very lean in terms of memory usage, it's effective at swapping things in and out, and is designed to use as much available ram as possible to boost performance. Again, free ram is wasted ram, and if it needs more ram for an operation it can free it up just fine. Remember, the Linux kernel dates from a time when 8kb was huge, it scales just fine to pretty much any amount of ram.

Granted, earlier versions of Android benefitted from task killers, because the Linux kernel generally moves tasks to the swap partition rather than killing them, and that's generally not available on an Android device, so when alot of things were open the device could slow down alot. Also, many of these devices had alot less ram than we do. Since froyo, however, such programs are useless, because the system has been tweaked to be able to manage programs itself, and it will cache or kill programs as needed. Auto task killers will only interfere with this process, hurting performance. Memory management tweaks, such as the V6 supercharger script can help, because these values are generally not optimized for the respective device, and certainly not users habits. However, you have to be smart with those, as bulletproofing your launcher and forcing a large amount of free ram will keep Apps from being able to have as much ram to share, hurting performance if you're a frequent multitasker.

Bottom line is this isn't Windows. The system doesn't need as much ram, it's very capable of managing itself properly, and having but a small amount of free ram is not a bad thing, it's by design. Not to say there aren't advantages to having 1gb of ram, but the difference isn't great at this point, and 512 is by no means small. I have yet to use a dual-core, 1gb phone that is any smoother in operation than my Charge with a properly optimized GB rom, and those that likely are, like the S2, owe that mainly to the processor. I doubt the Hummingbird would benefit much from any more ram.


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## hazard209 (Aug 1, 2011)

Not to mention that most of the newer ROMs are using swap which helps to compensate when more RAM is needed. If you feel like your phone is choking when multitasking then you probably are doing something wrong.


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## CraigL (Jun 17, 2011)

Mrmidnight said:


> I have tried to explain this point to people at work and not a soul believes me. Probably because they know how to log into facebook and how to send a text message.


It's a linux thing, they wouldnt understand.


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