Definitely good advice given. Stay away from task killers and cleanmaster.
The number shown as free ram is tricky to judge. I would never take any action in that number alone. BUT, I do believe that Android performance can in some cases suffer when there is too much memory taken by high priority "running services" (different than cached processes which hurt nothing). When memory is filled with high priority running services and there is a need for more memory, Android has to kill a high priority running service. Some of These running Services are not designed to be killed..results when killed can unpredictable (app fc etc)
For my S4, in the old days when I was running kitkat I had only a few mild problems that I attributed to memory use: 1 - While recording a run (in the background), the Mytracks app sometimes stopped recording when the phone did other things...example when receiving a phone call. Similarly, when getting navigation directions with navfeee in the background, it sometimes stopped when I was doing other things with the phone. Neither one was a big problem for me. Both are a disruption of the function of the apps (mytracks and navfree)...related to memory I believe. Both problems were later mostly eliminated by assigning these particular apps as "always resident" with app settings xposed module.
Immediately after upgrading to Lollipop, I began having a much worse problem where a bunch of my Tasker tasks would simultaneously execute out of the blue for no obvious reason (they were NOT triggered by any profile). It again tended to occur when a lot of other high priority things are going on, often at the moment when a phone call is received.
Review of the tasker event log shows that always just before these tasks fired, there is an event titled something like "monitor start".
Googling this event lead me to believe this should not happen except when tasker is started or killed/restarted. Again a memory related problem. Adjusting Tasker settings did not fix it. This time I also can't fix it with xposed app settings because that module (and many others) no longer works at all on Samsung device running lollipop (known problem).
My very acceptable (to me) solution was to reboot my phone once a day. It is not inconvenient at all (my routine is to initiate reboot just before I take a shower...phone is done when I get out). And guess what...It completely eliminated the tasker problem for the last two or three months (I was getting the problem every few days before I started rebooting).
By the way, I don't have any tweaks related to memory or app management (other than app settings which I had before in kitkat, no longer have it). I think maybe the problem I have is related to the infamous lollipop memory leak (my version is 5.0.1). Not positive. At any rate my phone obviously behaves differently than
@scary alien ... not surprising when there are so many varieties of phones and software and apps/customizations that we add to them.
My moral is that memory usage certainly can have an effect on your device, but it's tough to judge the absolute numbers...more valuable to look at what's normal for your device, how it changes over time, and only concern yourself if you see performance problems related to memory.
There is another tool to get a view of memory on your device. Developer options...process stats...tap on the bar to see how long you have between in the various memory states: normal, low, critical (see my attached example). Memory problems are obviously more likely when you are spending a lot of time in critical. Ordinarily mine doesn't spend much time in critical until it's gone a few days since reboot. Today it's showing some critical time already, only a few hours after reboot. I'm not sure why that is, but from my experience it should be ok as long as I reboot again tomorrow.
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