Discrepancy between data used by apps

[madmonk]

In Manage Applications, one can see that for example Watchdog Lite takes up 1 Mb. But in running services, it is shown as taking up 30 Mb. What is it using the extra 29mb for? I've checked other apps and this is not the exception, It's the general rule.

Now I fully understand that apps acquire data as time goes on, (eg note taking apps, web browser storing history and bookmarks, games storing saved games etc. ) but I'm from the zx spectrum generation,! I know what can be done with only 48 kilobytes, never mind megabytes! One byte stores one letter. in simple terms. So this post will take up about 2000 bytes, or 2kb including all the memory for the display of it.

Why the massive discrepancy ?

 

[sohguanh]

I believe the 1Mb is the total size for the Watchdog Lite apk file. The 30Mb is the amount of memory the app is using when it is running. Once the app terminates, the memory are returned back to the OS.

Think of an analogy like we have say Firefox.exe which is say 10Mb but when we double-click the exe we use Task Manager we see it is using maybe 80Mb as it is running.