Anybody else think 1GB of RAM is not enough? Not that I ever run out, but I get close enough that the phone as a whole runs slowly. Some apps force close as a result.
Nope.
If Android needs more available RAM, it kills the app least likely to be needed soonest. So unless you keep switching between apps that are getting killed, that's not the reason for your phone running slowly. (Of course if you keep switching between 2 apps that each need about 1GB of RAM, that would slow the phone down, as each one gets killed, then has to be reloaded.)
See, the problem isn't space. It's that it takes time to load an app once it's killed. Whether you swap the app and its state (that includes all its data) to another partition or you just kill the app (and it has to save its state whenevcer it's changed, which is how Android works), the time is about the same - unless the app has to be partially compiled each time it's loaded.
I was looking at a guide at XDA and it looks like people odex their phones to free up memory.
Deodex - to keep all parts of an app (or a ROM) together, not to free up user RAM. Leaving the apps odexed lets them load faster. The saving in Dalvik cache in deodexing them (if any) is minuscule, and has no effect on user RAM.
I'm not interested in that at all. I'm thinking more swap space.
Android doesn't swap, it kills. And killing doesn't have "space", so there's no "kill space".
Android is based on Linux, it's not pure Linux.
Would editing the kernel to support EXT4 then partitioning the sdcard to have more swap space work?
Define "work". Would you have an SD card with an ext4 partition? Sure. Would it give you more available RAM? No.
I'm really curious if this would be a workaround to limited RAM.
Android itself is the "workaround" to limited RAM in Linux. About the only thing it can't work around is an app that needs more RAM than you have - and if you can figure out how to put a gallon of water into a quart jar, we'll both be billionaires. (The analogy is apt - water, like a program that's executing, can't be compressed.)
There actually is a "workaround" - require app developers to actually write apps, and write the code tightly, as opposed to so many apps out there that are drag & drop monstrosities that could be written in one quarter the size. But that would make Windows look like open source freeware.
As far as space is concerned, an odex file uses space in the Dalvik cache, not in user RAM, so the whole thing is kind of moot. No matter how much Dalvik cache you free up, you don't get a single extra byte of user RAM.
This is something like the brilliant idea to kill apps that aren't being used at the moment. It usually ends in reduced performance, even though those apps are touted to increase performance. It (killing apps or your idea) is also called "winning the battle but losing the war".
