Database Develop

[TIP] less RAM usage...

Hi
maybe you guys already know about this but I just want to share this with others that maybe don't know... anyway.. to get less RAM usage do this:
use sktools or a registry program to enter the registry... go to HKCU, then software, HTC and BootLauncher, and apps, remove the apps and softreset your phone... after reset RAM usage should be under 30%, mine is at 27% but after a while 32%... stable. maybe someone thinks this is not good but it's working good for me without any problems before doing this the RAM usage was around 40%

nah, there are some applications that I need, like connection setup using Itjes V6.5

thuhoan said:
nah, there are some applications that I need, like connection setup using Itjes V6.5
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
then leave that but remove the others.. I have not tried with itjes ROM, but smaberg and udK... it's working fine, don't remember if I had "connection setup" ...

it's really pointless to eliminate random apps from automatic startup unless you perfectly know what they do...

less ram usage but a slower device.
these apps are loaded as background tasks so that you don't have to wait while they load everytime you use them...
now with as much memory as the x1 has I personally think its a good thing...I've not had an OOM error yet

fards said:
less ram usage but a slower device.
these apps are loaded as background tasks so that you don't have to wait while they load everytime you use them...
now with as much memory as the x1 has I personally think its a good thing...I've not had an OOM error yet
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
yep ... I added some apps to the exclusive list, so that they will start up faster (yota contacts, messaging ...). the memory usage is unimportant as long as there are no slow downs ... and there are none ...
so yes, memory usage will decrease when removing those apps, but the device is slower in genereal due missing pre loaded files.

hmm, might be right what you're saying but I think my device is faster now than before.. it was not so important apps that I removed... the phone is stable..

Does keeping your home app in memory drain more battery?

I don't know if it's me or setting "Home app in memory" on CM drains waaay more battery.
I have 1600 mAh battery that usually lasts 8 AM to midnight and still has 20-30% left. Whereas when I set my phone to keep home app in memory, the battery is under 50% before noon.

It sure will!
And this is why:
When you run a new program and the memory is filled, things need to be dumped from ram to make space.
The home application ONLY needs to be run while you are on the desktop -- it doesn't actually do anything when you have some other application in the foreground. If you force it to stay loaded in memory, then other things (background processes) will get dumped from memory instead -- things that need to be running more or less all the time. So what happens when you force the home application to stay in memory, is that these background processes get into a crazy cycle of constantly trying to RELOAD. Maybe bumping some other stuff out of memory to do so, causing those other things to get into constantly trying to reload. In other words, it causes a much higher CPU load and eats up your batter.

Makes sense, but is there anything that could help, like enabling compcache or swap?

lbcoder said:
It sure will!
And this is why:
When you run a new program and the memory is filled, things need to be dumped from ram to make space.
The home application ONLY needs to be run while you are on the desktop -- it doesn't actually do anything when you have some other application in the foreground. If you force it to stay loaded in memory, then other things (background processes) will get dumped from memory instead -- things that need to be running more or less all the time. So what happens when you force the home application to stay in memory, is that these background processes get into a crazy cycle of constantly trying to RELOAD. Maybe bumping some other stuff out of memory to do so, causing those other things to get into constantly trying to reload. In other words, it causes a much higher CPU load and eats up your batter.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Wow...great explanation. Thanks! I'll disable this setting then.

Neejay said:
Wow...great explanation. Thanks! I'll disable this setting then.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It's a trade-off. For me returning to the home from any app is way to slow unless I have that feature enabled.
Maybe it's because I have a widget and 8 icons on the main screen?

I have 2 widgets and 4 icons on home screen (total of 7 widgets and 25 icons on 5 screens) so for me disabling "keep home in memory" is not even an option lol

Even just having a lot of applications installed will make it take longer for launcher to start up.... it has to scan through all the programs installed, figure out what icon to use (and deal with it), figure out what name to use, build the menu, etc., etc., etc.

wheres the option for this?

You can find it in Spare Parts app on several ROMs (I use CM).

[Q] Apps kept coming back after autokill -> memory leak -> lag

Hi all,
1. I've got these applications (Smartone-Vodophone SV app, 5 days weather, google map, social hub and such) that would keep coming back, relaunching themselves even after I put them onto my task manager's autokill list. Seems like they would wait around for me to enable the wifi/3G connection and then launch themselves. I even installed other apps to disable autolaunch and they would still launch themselves in the background every now and then. I had to kill them every time I unlocked my screen and these "launching and killing" cycles eventually depleted my memory down to below 100MB, making the lag situation even worse. Does anyone know how I can stop them from launching, without having to uninstall these apps?
2. I haven't installed the lagfix and I understand that the fix has to do with reformatting the apps' partition with a faster file system to reduce the lag (probably by giving it faster I/O access to the program's binaries?) I'm still waiting for Froyo, which should be out in a couple of weeks in my country. Does anyone know if Froyo would take care of this file system problem? Even with the Froyo or one-click lag fix, it still would not solve the apps launching and memory leak problem, right?
3. I notice that after I've installed more apps, the lag situation got worse. I was playing some songs on the external SD cards and it choked once in a while. I made sure I killed all the other apps and that I still got 100+MB to run just this one song player app and yet it would still choke. This tells me that the lag has nothing to do with available memory. And the player app was stock that came with the phone so there shouldn't be any fragmentation issue (apps installed later might have?) that makes it run slow. And if its the bad file system, this app, running all by itself, should have all the I/O bandwidth to itself so the access to the app's binaries should not have any lag... and neither should the access to the songs on the external SD card. So what exactly is causing the lag then? I don't see how the lagfix would solve this problem either. I actually have read that the lags would come back after a period of usage even with the lagfix. Anyone got an insight to this problem? What exactly is causing the lag? and why installing more apps seem to make it worse? and would Froyo be able to fix all these problems?
Thanks a lot.

@boarder838
I think you really need to read a lot more about just how Android works as you seem to have some strange ideas about how it works.
To start with you need to realise that having 200mb or 100mb of free Ram makes zero difference to performance only when you have no free Ram is it a problem and even then the system will sort it out for you by closing the least used program. Free Ram is just wasted Ram as it's not doing anything and will not make your device respond or work faster using a Auto Task Killer is wasting your battery and slowing down your device not speeding it up and saving battery as you seem to think. As i have pointed out above stop obsessing over your free Ram amount as unless you have none its not a problem stop using a Task Killer and you will most probably see your device responds faster as its not constantly killing things and just leaves them open doing nothing in the back ground which doesn't use Ram or Battery so just leave them be.
Yes Froyo will bring many improvements to our devices but won't fix a problem that doesn't exist re memory leaks and apps launching that you seem to think you have. I don't know but some of those apps may be system apps that need to run all the time which is why they keep relaunching. As for a lag fix well that's what we are all hoping for but if not I'm pretty sure the great people of this forum will come up with an easy to apply fix to it.
I have absolutely no problem playing Music or even streaming it over Bluetooth no lag stutters or break ups at all although my Music is on the Internal SD card. Maybe you should look at the quality that you have encoded your Music in as that may be causing problem. maybe some of the apps you have installed are also causing a problem but its impossible to know as we all install different apps and have different set ups.
I don't know how much experience you have with Android devices or flashing Roms but if you read enough and understand it you have the possibility to flash custom Rom's and various tweaks and fixes to make your device how you want it. That's part of the beauty of Android but don't rush into anything you are not sure about as you can end up with an expensive brick so read things many times and make sure you understand step by step what you are doing if you are going to attempt any of these things.
If you look at my signature you will see i am running a Custom Rom that includes a lag fix and various other tweaks it also allowed me to remove some of the programs in the official Rom that i didn't want or need. For me my device runs nice and smooth and fast of course I'm looking forward to Froyo and all the improvements that will bring but I'm quite happy with my Galaxy S the way it is now. Oh and this is my second Android device and I've never used a Task Killer never mind an Auto Task Killer and have never seen an out of Ram message either.
Marc

exactly what he said ^

Hi Marc,
Thanks for spending time to read through my long post and reply to it. I probably didn't explain my problem clearly in my post.
There were a couple of reasons I wanted to kill/stop the apps from starting:
1. Even before I installed any of those apps killer, I noticed that the available memory kept going down after a couple days of usage and it went down to below 100M. I figured some of the apps would need 10's of MB to run so I thought I should at least keep 100MB around so that it wouldn't run out of memory and start swapping when I start those apps. I don't know enough about Android but I assume its just like linux or other OS, when it runs out of physical memory, it would start swapping and slow things down. Even after I started using task killer and killed all the other tasks, the memory level would still not recover. That seems to point to a memory leak problem but using "Memory Booster" to do garbage collection seems to help. Still, it would be nice to be able to stop them from launching in the first place. <-- my first question.
2. I do not want any jobs/processes/apps that I don't need to run in the background to drain my battery. I don't think I can say for sure that those apps are all just idling and not using much CPU/battery. There are quite a few of them so if each of them use some CPU time/battery, it will add up eventually. Note that these are not system processes (or daemons as in unix's init.d). They are crappy apps from the cellular provider so I'm pretty sure they don't have to be running (they're probably just collecting my personal data or smth). I just thought there would be a way to stop them from launching without uninstalling them.
Thanks for answering my question regarding Froyo. If they would do the filesystem lagfix then I'll just wait for that update.
As for the music stuttering problem, my songs are on the external SD card but my old Nokia E85 phone has no problem playing with those songs on the same SD card. As I have pointed out in my last question, I was only running one app and with plenty of memory so it had nothing to do with available memory. I also suggested that however bad the filesystem was, the I/O bandwidth should still be enough to run this one music player app (access the program binary/libraries?) and to retrieve data from external SD card to play the music smoothly. So applying the lagfix probably won't help this problem though I still haven't tried the lagfix. Now I'm thinking that one of the task killer might be killing some system processes which were needed by the music player. I probably should uninstall all these task killers and see if it would help.
I have gotten the phone for only a couple of weeks so I haven't gotten around to try flashing different roms or rooting my phone. There's so much info scattered around on the web and I can't seem to find a source that really has the authority or complete information. I'll see if I have time later to look into all the tweaks and such but for now its just a phone to me and I just want it to run smoothly without having to spend too much effort to tune it.
Don't get me wrong. I still love the flexibility and customization opportunities provided by the Android platform and I just love to show off my "Beautiful Weather Widget", "Live Aquarium Wall Paper" and my cool 3D scrolling "Launcher Pro" to my iphone4 buddies and make them drool.
Thanks for you comment and let's hope Froyo will bring us a smooth running and stable platform.
Dogmann said:
@boarder838
I think you really need to read a lot more about just how Android works as you seem to have some strange ideas about how it works.
To start with you need to realise that having 200mb or 100mb of free Ram makes zero difference to performance only when you have no free Ram is it a problem and even then the system will sort it out for you by closing the least used program. Free Ram is just wasted Ram as it's not doing anything and will not make your device respond or work faster using a Auto Task Killer is wasting your battery and slowing down your device not speeding it up and saving battery as you seem to think. As i have pointed out above stop obsessing over your free Ram amount as unless you have none its not a problem stop using a Task Killer and you will most probably see your device responds faster as its not constantly killing things and just leaves them open doing nothing in the back ground which doesn't use Ram or Battery so just leave them be.
Yes Froyo will bring many improvements to our devices but won't fix a problem that doesn't exist re memory leaks and apps launching that you seem to think you have. I don't know but some of those apps may be system apps that need to run all the time which is why they keep relaunching. As for a lag fix well that's what we are all hoping for but if not I'm pretty sure the great people of this forum will come up with an easy to apply fix to it.
I have absolutely no problem playing Music or even streaming it over Bluetooth no lag stutters or break ups at all although my Music is on the Internal SD card. Maybe you should look at the quality that you have encoded your Music in as that may be causing problem. maybe some of the apps you have installed are also causing a problem but its impossible to know as we all install different apps and have different set ups.
I don't know how much experience you have with Android devices or flashing Roms but if you read enough and understand it you have the possibility to flash custom Rom's and various tweaks and fixes to make your device how you want it. That's part of the beauty of Android but don't rush into anything you are not sure about as you can end up with an expensive brick so read things many times and make sure you understand step by step what you are doing if you are going to attempt any of these things.
If you look at my signature you will see i am running a Custom Rom that includes a lag fix and various other tweaks it also allowed me to remove some of the programs in the official Rom that i didn't want or need. For me my device runs nice and smooth and fast of course I'm looking forward to Froyo and all the improvements that will bring but I'm quite happy with my Galaxy S the way it is now. Oh and this is my second Android device and I've never used a Task Killer never mind an Auto Task Killer and have never seen an out of Ram message either.
Marc
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

Oh I found the problem with stuttering music. It was the "beautiful weather widget"! I tried removing all the task killers and aquarium etc and it still wouldn't work. As soon as I removed the weather widget there was no problem with music playback anymore. Anyone has the same problem that pretty weather widget?? I've already set the refresh period to every 3 hours but it still wouldn't help?!

How's your experience with app background closing on ICS?

Hi. I tried a few of ICS roms available for i9000 out there, and all of them are pretty fast, much better than I expected. The only issue I have with any ICS rom I've recently tried is that they close apps in background quite often. For example, I might open my Opera Mobile, switch to SMS app, send a message, and then when I return Opera has to start over and load all the pages again. Does it happen to You as well? As a comparison, I tested it with a 2.3.4 MIUI rom I had as a Nandroid backup, and it's much better - most apps stay open in background for a longer time.
Is it possible that ICS has that bigger of a memory footprint over Gingerbread? What are your opinions on that? Experienced similar issues? Any workarounds?

warnec said:
Hi. I tried a few of ICS roms available for i9000 out there, and all of them are pretty fast, much better than I expected. The only issue I have with any ICS rom I've recently tried is that they close apps in background quite often. For example, I might open my Opera Mobile, switch to SMS app, send a message, and then when I return Opera has to start over and load all the pages again. Does it happen to You as well? As a comparison, I tested it with a 2.3.4 MIUI rom I had as a Nandroid backup, and it's much better - most apps stay open in background for a longer time.
Is it possible that ICS has that bigger of a memory footprint over Gingerbread? What are your opinions on that? Experienced similar issues? Any workarounds?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Try using less widgets. Don't use apps like Facebook. Check push notification services of some apps.

Also, i seem to remember that Opera Mobile tends to "forget" loaded pages very quickly, if you don't come back to the app quite fast...
You can also try and check under settings > developer options > see if you have checked "don't keep activities" and under "background process limit" choose "standard limit"

Since I'm only getting advice, I take it I'm the only one having this problem? Strange. The only widget I have on my desktop is the stock ICS analog clock widget, and there is no such thing as "Developer options" in my Opera Mobile.
Right now I'm using AOKP rom b27, there is an option called "Free memory - Amount of RAM the minfree taskkiller will keep". I tried to change it to max possible - 100MB, didn't change anything.
Is you are using ICS roms, you never had such issues? Which roms do you use?
PS Could a different kernel make it better?

Opera uses alot of memory and the phones memory is very limited. Doesn't matter the ROM it will often get closed when you leave it to do other things.
BTW increasing the memory the OS keeps free makes it worse, how do you think it frees memory? By closing things. You actually want to decrease the memory it keeps free to try and help with this. The downside is that the phone will probably lag more and I have found it doesn't help much.

I'll try to use the stock browser. As to that task manager setting:
The description says:"Amount of RAM the taskkiller will keep", so I have no idea if it means keeping some RAM available at all times or is it the amount of RAM that can't be cleared.

warnec said:
I'll try to use the stock browser. As to that task manager setting:
The description says:"Amount of RAM the taskkiller will keep", so I have no idea if it means keeping some RAM available at all times or is it the amount of RAM that can't be cleared.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It is never the amount of RAM that can not be cleared it is the amount of RAM to keep free. ie if you set 64MB Ram to be kept free Taskkiller will keep that amount of memory free by killing the oldest non active task/process

[Q] Trouble with RAM management?

I got my Xperia Z1 about a month ago, and I've noticed some issues with RAM management (or possibly under-optimized third-party apps). Although I haven't had much luck in replicating the problem, I noticed it happen a few times after a Firefox internet session, or after playing a graphically intensive game like Dead Trigger 2. The app would either close by itself (not crash, as in, there were no error messages), or, after I'd close it, I'd notice my launcher (Nova Launcher Prime) go into a restart loop. A quick glance at the running apps section in settings shows 50-100 MB of free ram, and all "constantly running" apps (launcher, viber, zooper widget, k9-mail, swiftkey, tasker, etc.) stuck, for want of a better phrase, in a restarting loop (due to lack of ram I guess).
I tried running Fast Reboot (a task killer) to see if I could regain stability of the system, but it kills only a few system tasks, freeing up to a measly 50 MB of RAM, which makes me wonder (in aggravation) just where the RAM is being used. The only way the running apps would stop closing and restarting (and I need the launcher stable) is to reboot. I'm not sure if the system would stabilize after x minutes, as I only waited for a minute or two before rebooting so that I could open another app/game.
I'm not trying to start yet another debate on necessity of used RAM on Android and efficiency/futility of task managers/killers, but what I described above really seems like poor RAM management to me. I've had a few android devices in the past, and experienced various problems /errors, but never something like this.
Has anybody had a similar issue, or have any tips?
My Xperia Z1 C6903 is currently running on rooted stock 14.2.A.0.290

Although i dont get force closes, but ive noticed most of the ram is taken by the phone itself, right now for me it says i have 1.1gb in use, when i close everything i have just a slight (barely even noticeable) increase in free ram, when i click on cached processes and close all one by one ive seen it increases the ram use instead of decreasing it?
But, do you use apps like setcpu? You can keep it on performance and keep the min slider to the lowest and the max slider to max, it runs stable and gives you performance when you need it, and no performance when you dont need it.
If all fails, try deleting system apps that you barely even use or need... Becareful what you delete tho!

mobzw995 said:
Although i dont get force closes, but ive noticed most of the ram is taken by the phone itself, right now for me it says i have 1.1gb in use, when i close everything i have just a slight (barely even noticeable) increase in free ram, when i click on cached processes and close all one by one ive seen it increases the ram use instead of decreasing it?
But, do you use apps like setcpu? You can keep it on performance and keep the min slider to the lowest and the max slider to max, it runs stable and gives you performance when you need it, and no performance when you dont need it.
If all fails, try deleting system apps that you barely even use or need... Becareful what you delete tho!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for the reply. No, I've used apps like that in the past, but haven't installed anything similar on the Z1, because I noticed in BetterBatteryStats that the CPU speed goes down often when the screen is off, and up when, I suppose, it's required, such as in intensive games...

What apps do you use? For example facebook, YouTube, browser etc
Ive checked again on my cached apps and to my surprise, AOSP browser takes up 208mb!
Facebook takes up 48mb, and youtube takes up 22mb.
It just depends on the apps you have installed, some use the ram even while the phone is asleep.
Ive stopped those and a huge difference was made on freeing up my ram!
What i dont get is tho why sony advertises 2.2ghz quadcore if the phone itself takes most of it?
Just delete the apps you dont need from "all apps".