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Help Loss of RAM

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andrewmclalin

Lurker
So i have a task manager widget on my S4 and i am already aware that touchwiz takes up a bunch of RAM, leaving me with usually 700-800mb free. But ever since i updated the widget (earlier today), it said i only have 300-400mb free, and now im down to 100-200mb free. I don't know if theres a new process draining my RAM, or if updating the widget got it more in depth to my phone usage. Any help or tips would be nice, i've used the kill apps button many times, and i can't see any funy processes in the settings using crazy amounts of RAM. It's pretty ridiculous that the phone comes with 2gb and somehow i only have 200mb free to use.
 
Welcome to the forums andrewmclalin. Have you tried cleaning up your cache files? Clean Master (Cleaner) in the Play Store is a free app that automates this task as well as other things. Give it a try, You'll be surprised at how much space you free up especially if you've never cleaned out your caches before.
 
Thank you, and clearing the cache and processes got my RAM back up to 300-400mb free but i'm still confused how my phone had such a big jump of losing 400mb of usable RAM overnight even when i've cleared everything multiple times.
 
This is not a problem, you just need to read up on how Android manages memory.

Android is not like Windows, it will normally use as much memory as it has for buffers and will clear out memory as needed. Task managers are a menace and do not serve any useful purpose on modern versions of Android. Killing processes manually interferes with this process and should be avoided.

If your phone is noticeably slow, there may be an issue but the amount of free memory available is not something worth monitoring in itself. Let Android get on with its job, it knows what it is doing and will free up memory as it is needed.
 
andrewmclalin said:
Thank you, and clearing the cache and processes got my RAM back up to 300-400mb free but i'm still confused how my phone had such a big jump of losing 400mb of usable RAM overnight even when i've cleared everything multiple times.
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As I said, doing this will make things worse not better. Android keeps data in memory unless it needs to free up space. By manually clearing the cache and killing processes you are interfering in this process and doing this will result in your phone running more slowly not more quickly.

All the activity that an operating system does in the background uses memory and since the OS leaves it in RAM unless the space is needed for something else, it will normally just fill up. It is supposed to do this and having the RAM full means it is doing something useful rather than lying idly around unused.

Your best bet is to uninstall the task manager and just let Android get on with it, your phone will run better as a result.

Here is one (of many) useful posts on XDA that explains some of the background to this and why you shouldn't use a task killer http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1966564.
 
I was about to say the very same thing. But Lotus49 and the XDA link, did it with far better grammar than I ever could :)
 
Thank you, I actually deleted it before you told me to do so, and now that i know theres a good reason behind all the RAM usage, i'll ignore it. Out of sight, out of mind :P.
 
andrewmclalin said:
Thank you, I actually deleted it before you told me to do so, and now that i know theres a good reason behind all the RAM usage, i'll ignore it. Out of sight, out of mind :P.
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You're right on with your "out of sight, out of mind" for Android. Many years of using multiple OSs I find it difficult not to go tinker with stuff that doesn't need to be tinkered with. The Android OS is one of those that does nicely without us. I know, sad, but still, there's plenty else you can tinker with.
 
It's particularly true you don't have to worry about it when you have 2GB of ram. When I look at how much free space I have and the programs which are still loaded that I haven't used for a long time, it's amazing. With my old Moto D2G getting a phone call while on the road would sometimes cause another program I was using (e.g. a music player) to close. No such issues (yet) with more ram. Right now I have over 500 mb free, and that is typical.
 
All that being said, inasmuch as we're not talking about paging/snagging data to/from a spinner drive, but rather an SSD, really how much performance is lost by clearing RAM? It's all SSD. I wonder what the actual performance difference is between leaving the RAM loaded vs going to the SSD for the data?
 
speedlever said:
All that being said, inasmuch as we're not talking about paging/snagging data to/from a spinner drive, but rather an SSD, really how much performance is lost by clearing RAM? It's all SSD. I wonder what the actual performance difference is between leaving the RAM loaded vs going to the SSD for the data?
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If data is already in memory, it doesn't need to be loaded from the SSD so there will definitely be a performance hit while data is copied over and this has been verified in testing.

In addition to which, the main memory is DRAM not NAND flash, which is substantially slower.
 
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