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Help Application for managing and allocating maximum RAM for heavy application acceleration

JossephAl

Lurker
Hello everyone :)

I really like this forum, you always have Great solutions.

My question is is there any app (as up-to-date as possible until at least 2019) to manage and allocate RAM to apps (as I wish)?

My request stems because I have a very heavy application installed on the device
My Samsung Galaxy Note Plus and I have enough RAM .. And I want to allocate most of this RAM to this heavy app.

This heavy application is a virtual machine running an entire Windows 7 system that has software that is only supported on Windows systems (that's why I work with this app because those programs don't work and have no replacement for the Android app) so I need a lot of power for this app.

I would love to get a solution or if there is an app that does not require ROOT access (which is a kind of "loophole" in my country because if I do ROOT to the device I lose the warranty terms on the device and this is a new device...).

Thanks in advance :)
 
An important thing to remember is that Android, in common with other *nix operating systems (Linux, MacOS and the many Unix flavours), works on the principle that "free RAM is wasted RAM". So it will keep recently or frequently used apps loaded into RAM ready for when you next use them, rather than just clearing the RAM when you leave the app and then leaving it empty. This is a more efficient way of working: reloading those apps uses time and power, and empty RAM is doing you no good at all. If the RAM is needed by another process, the OS will clear one or more of those dormant apps from RAM and reallocate it. It also means that the sort of RAM occupancy that makes Windows users think "I need more RAM" is normal in Android, indeed a sign that things are working correctly.

So the short answer to your question is that the operating system handles RAM allocations, and you shouldn't have to. If your VM requires more RAM then the OS should free up RAM used by other dormant apps. If you have any significant RAM free when the VM is running that means that the VM is not requesting it (and hence there would be no gain from "allocating" more to the VM). The only problem that should arise would be if the VM requires more RAM than can be made available without closing vital system services, and in that case I doubt that your manually tweaking will make things work better.

But also what you are asking for is the ability to override the kernel's RAM management. The only apps I've met which allow you to change this required root, and even then it wasn't as fine-grained as "allocate extra RAM to a specific app". I cannot imagine a non-root app being able to override something like this.

There is an option in the "developer options" menu (normally hidden: find the "build number" in the software information and tap repeatedly on it to unhide the menu) called "don't keep activities": this should close apps the moment you leave them, which in principle will leave more RAM unused - but as noted, that will degrade multitasking but shouldn't, if the phone is configured properly, improve the VM's performance (whether there might be a placebo effect I can't say). It will also mean that it will close the VM if you switch to anything else. But it's probably about the only thing you can do to RAM management without root.
 
An important thing to remember is that Android, in common with other *nix operating systems (Linux, MacOS and the many Unix flavours), works on the principle that "free RAM is wasted RAM". So it will keep recently or frequently used apps loaded into RAM ready for when you next use them, rather than just clearing the RAM when you leave the app and then leaving it empty. This is a more efficient way of working: reloading those apps uses time and power, and empty RAM is doing you no good at all. If the RAM is needed by another process, the OS will clear one or more of those dormant apps from RAM and reallocate it. It also means that the sort of RAM occupancy that makes Windows users think "I need more RAM" is normal in Android, indeed a sign that things are working correctly.

So the short answer to your question is that the operating system handles RAM allocations, and you shouldn't have to. If your VM requires more RAM then the OS should free up RAM used by other dormant apps. If you have any significant RAM free when the VM is running that means that the VM is not requesting it (and hence there would be no gain from "allocating" more to the VM). The only problem that should arise would be if the VM requires more RAM than can be made available without closing vital system services, and in that case I doubt that your manually tweaking will make things work better.

But also what you are asking for is the ability to override the kernel's RAM management. The only apps I've met which allow you to change this required root, and even then it wasn't as fine-grained as "allocate extra RAM to a specific app". I cannot imagine a non-root app being able to override something like this.

There is an option in the "developer options" menu (normally hidden: find the "build number" in the software information and tap repeatedly on it to unhide the menu) called "don't keep activities": this should close apps the moment you leave them, which in principle will leave more RAM unused - but as noted, that will degrade multitasking but shouldn't, if the phone is configured properly, improve the VM's performance (whether there might be a placebo effect I can't say). It will also mean that it will close the VM if you switch to anything else. But it's probably about the only thing you can do to RAM management without root.

Hi Hadron :)

Thanks so much for the broad explanation and yet can you offer me an app (which even requires root penetration) or some way (I didn't really understand how to do the action you suggested through "Developer Information") that is closest and effective to what I'm asking for?

Thank you very much for the great attentiveness and professional and enriching explanation :)

Thanks in advance ,
 
I'm thinking that something like Windows 7 would be painfully slow, running with software emulation of Intel x86 on a mobile ARM processor.

Windows can be painful even when it's running on a PC.

Hi Mikedt ,

True it is slow, but surprisingly the app (which is used as a virtual machine) is built really well in a way that works quite reasonably and quickly, but I have heavy software (with a lot of information) that I open in windows (which is installed on this virtual machine app) that slows me down In any case, I'm really looking for a solution to speed up the work (whether it's through some Android settings or downloading an app that can manage RAM)

Thanks in advance ,
 
I'm afraid it's a few years since I played with root apps for tweaking RAM management, so can't at the moment even remember the name of the one I had played with. Even then it really only allowed you to change how aggressively the phone cleared dormant apps out of RAM, not to change the RAM management to favour a particular app.

If I remember the name I'll post it here.
 
Hi Mikedt ,

True it is slow, but surprisingly the app (which is used as a virtual machine) is built really well in a way that works quite reasonably and quickly, but I have heavy software (with a lot of information) that I open in windows (which is installed on this virtual machine app) that slows me down In any case, I'm really looking for a solution to speed up the work (whether it's through some Android settings or downloading an app that can manage RAM)

Thanks in advance ,

Maybe it could be done with rooting and something custom?

If you really do need your memory hungry Windows software on a mobile device, perhaps a small Windows tablet would be a better option for you? Or even a GPD mini laptop, some of which are not much bigger than a phone.
 
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