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Something about ram!

N

NafeesAhmed

Newbie
Hello everybody, i read from somewhere but not really remember from where
"free ram is the wasted ram"
What does that really mean??
I thought the more free ram is the more better it works ! Am i right or wrong please everybody lets have some discussion about it ...
Thank you
 
Android handles RAM differently than how a computer does:

The problem is that Android uses RAM differently than, say, Windows. On Android, having your RAM nearly full is a good thing. It means that when you relaunch an app you've previously opened, the app launches quickly and returns to its previous state. So while Android actually uses RAM efficiently, most users see that their RAM is full and assume that's what's slowing down their phone. In reality, your CPU—which is only used by apps that are actually active—is almost always the bottleneck.

Android Task Killers Explained: What They Do and Why You Shouldn't Use Them
 
More free RAM better it works = Windows 98

Free RAM is wasted RAM/ More RAM by OS is better = Android/Linux/Windows with superfetch/prefetch turned on.

There's no discussion needed here really. The OS loads the most commonly used programs onto the RAM on bootup so that when you click on them they open quickly. They are unloaded from RAM as more of it is needed, then reloaded when there is enough free capacity. So basically, the more apps you can have preloaded to your RAM, the faster they open. And the more RAM you have, the more apps you can load and run at the same time.

Of course the set back in this is that on lower end phones, you can't have a heavy setup like some more powerful phones have without having performance issues because the RAM is too few to run everything.
 
Apps you leave without exiting are just cached (imagine them frozen in stasis) in ram so that when you open them, theyre already loaded and they remember what you were doing when you left them. Its just flash memory on a chip and doesnt use any power, it just makes things more convenient/efficient for the user :)
If android is running out of ram, it will remove the apps that are less commonly used by you and keep the commonly used ones and ones that are essential for the device to function :thumbup:


EDIT d'oh i just got double-ninja'd by two of my favourite AFers :beer::beer:
 
it also depends on the device. mine is extremely limited on RAM and i've upgraded from Froyo to Gingerbread via root which makes it worse. my phone only has 256MB RAM and normally on a higher end device with much more, no one should have to worry about what is running. but on lower end or older devices, the more apps you install, the more memory they attempt to use. since i use Go Launcher along with its many plugins, whenever too much runs, Android tends to kill my launcher causing further problems, because the launcher runs as an app, and if i tick the option to prevent that, the phone will eventually auto-reboot whenever it runs out of memory (yes it is possible, 256MB RAM, and fifteen apps use all of it, another app tries to load in the background for notification, and the phone simply reboots because it can't kill enough to spare). normally Android shouldn't use more than 85% of the RAM. the problem is whenever you got too many apps fighting for space in RAM, and Android tries to go on a killing spree and kills important stuff to compensate, eventually it kills the wrong one and it reboots. as a result, i installed Go Task Manager's premium version and have it set to kill only apps that i haven't whitelisted or use, whenever it reaches the 86% mark, it does so. i have whitelisted all system services, system apps, the launcher, Google Play and far more. as a result it is far more stable, although it does still tend to lag if i am doing too much with it.

To answer the OP's question, Android is the exact opposite of Windows. Windows chokes if even so much as 50% is used up, not sure if that has been fixed as of Windows 8 as i cannot kill it no matter what, but Android only runs efficiently if it is always running in RAM. if an app shuts down, or if Android kills it to make more for another larger app, you will notice a delay if you try to restart that app later, by a blank screen which displays up to a couple minutes before you actually see the app. in a worse case scenario, you may get 'Sorry! The application [name here] is not responding [force close] [wait] [report]' if it takes too long. normally clicking the 'wait' a few times will succeed, or if the memory is just too far gone or used, the phone auto-reboots. i wish i could disable those prompts as 90% of the time it would work perfectly fine without needing me to click 'wait' over and over again. so annoying.

the idiom 'Free RAM is wasted RAM' is something dating back to UNIX, then Linux, from which Android is built off of.
 
I'm sure the Windows part has been fixed ages ago. My normal running RAM is somewhere between 55 to 60%. Although I do have superfetch active.
 
Windows 8 tends to mimic the same kind of multitasking used in other platforms. i haven't seen a BSoD on it yet. if i can have two large PC Games open and still browse the forums, something must be far different from Windows XP or earlier
 
If I remember correctly, Superfetch was introduced in the last update for XP. I'm on Windows 7 and yes it caches programs that are frequently accessed to RAM.
 
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