[Q] When will we see the full use of the 512mb of ram?

[Q] When will we see the full use of the 512mb of ram? - Vibrant General

So many froyo roms in development section, but still Vibrant showing 324 (more or less) of ram available? Isn't froyo suppose to fee that part of ram up that is not being used in eclair?

I think some of it is reserved for the GPU
Sent from my SGH-T959 using XDA App

There's a thread in the i9000 section about this. The short version is that all that RAM you can't see is reserved for various parts of the device to use. The radio uses some, the camera uses some, the GPU, etc.. It sucks that that memory is reserved even if you aren't using the GPU, for example, but that's how it is. They have a kernel patch over there that attempts to free up some of it by reducing the allocations. It seems to work without causing problems, but time will tell.
So the answer to the question is NEVER. There is 512MB of RAM in the device, but you won't be able to use all 512MB for user progams ever. This is no different than most off the shelf computers, they advertise 4GB of RAM, but the internal graphics takes 512MB, and other devices in the machine often do the same thing. Would it be nice if manufacturers wern't allowed to advertise this way? Maybe. However, Samsung isn't doing anything that isn't "industry standard". IMO they should all be advertising user-available RAM rather than installed RAM, but then people would ***** that the OS takes up some RAM, so you will never make everyone happy.

I would be unhappy if I thought we needed more RAM, but honestly I've never seen my Vibrant even get close to low.

I don't mind the RAM issue as I'm not having issues (yet), what I don't like is the internal storage.
On the Vibrant it's not too bad since we have 16GB, but for something like the G2 where they advertise it as 4GB, but you only have access to ~1.5, that's just not cool!
Eventually there'll probably be some kernel tweaks or something that'll free up some of that internal RAM, but I don't forsee anyone coding for it until they actually need it themselves (nothing speeds up development more than personal interest....why do you think the dev ROMs are so much better than the Samsung ones).

Related

[Q] 340mb ram instead of 512mb?

My tw taskmanager shows only 340mb ram instead of 512mb, after some research I found that the rest of the ram is used for ramdisk,is that true?
If so,is there a way to use all of 512mb for ram?And does this make Epic inferior to Vibrant,Captivate and Fascinate or better?

All Galaxy S phones have 512 MBs of RAM. And I do believe all are the same. At least the i9000 and the Epic are.

The phone has a physical 512MB of RAM, but I don't believe that the stock kernel currently supports more than 340MB.

thephawx said:
All Galaxy S phones have 512 MBs of RAM. And I do believe all are the same. At least the i9000 and the Epic are.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Check your built in taskmanager(by holding home button),it only shows 324mb total ram,so no they not all the same.Yes we do have 512mb but only 324mb(give or take few mb) is used for actual ram,the rest is used as ramdisk(cache).Vibrant and Captivate uses whole 512mb as ram and internal rom(hd) for cache,im not sure about original Galaxy or Fascinate.
Believe me extra ram not being available has huge impact on performance,i owned MT3gs with 512mb ram and 600mhz cpu and it felt just as fast as my Epic if not faster even with Sense.
This could explain big lag im getting with 4-5 apps open,i could have 10 apps open on Mytouch slide with no lag.

lviv73 said:
Check your built in taskmanager(by holding home button),it only shows 324mb total ram,so no they not all the same.Yes we do have 512mb but only 324mb(give or take few mb) is used for actual ram,the rest is used as ramdisk(cache).Vibrant and Captivate uses whole 512mb as ram and internal rom(hd) for cache,im not sure about original Galaxy or Fascinate.
Believe me extra ram not being available has huge impact on performance,i owned MT3gs with 512mb ram and 600mhz cpu and it felt just as fast as my Epic if not faster even with Sense.
This could explain big lag im getting with 4-5 apps open,i could have 10 apps open on Mytouch slide with no lag.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
There is a reason why. There is no dalvik cache push to sd for our devices yet. If we could get an ext2 or ext3 or ext 4 for our sd cards and move the cache there, it would be a whole new ball game. But it's no availible for us yet

Maybe to balance the phones out because epic has 2 cameras and keyboard
Sent from my iPod touch using Tapatalk

I wonder if other models have same ram or they have full 512mb of usable ram without ramdisk,and does that makes epic faster or slower?
I know my MT3gs was way faster with stock sense 600mhz cpu and 512 ram(without sd cache),sounds like this phone needs that extra 128+ram because extra ram makes more difference than faster cpu,324mb ram I dont think is sufficient for 2.1 to run smoothly.Hope someone comes up with something so we can use whole 512mb as ram and internal rom or sd for cache.

The reason why we have only 320 showing is because samsung moved the cache there to prevent the lag some people here talkming about the galaxy s having.
Sent from my SPH-D700 using Tapatalk

EPIC FAIL ...325 for me :-(
2012 the Evolution of Human Consciousness

supposedly the GPU uses 128mb of the ram

All 5 galaxy s phones have 512mb but the epic and fascinate are limited to the 300 and something because our phones are the only ones that don't have a massive amount of internal sd like the others. We ours uses the more typical smaller amount of rom and the missing ram is used to stop touchwiz from lagging! Why do manufacturers and carriers keep ****ing up android!? Love this device but I can customize it myself just fine without the extra tw layer eating my resources and slowing my upgrade releases!
Sent from my Epic 4G using xda app

We have 512mb rom which can be used for cache,i have all the apps I need installed in /system/app folder and still have 400mb free,how much should be dedicated to android swap 128,256?So there is plenty of room and for those people that have about 100 apps on they phone they need to wait for a2sd.
Still no one has answered if its possible to use whole 512mb for ram,this phone really neads it,most of the time I have 3-4 apps open and about 80mb ram free-thats not good.Epic has fastets rom out of any model,now if we could use it for cache and a2sd for apps,plus whole 512mb as ram,than this thing would fly.128 for swap is a waste,plus I think that this 128mb actualy takes away from GPU's vram.

I agree that we need more RAM. There has to be a way to edit the kernel and get more out of our hardware.

Browser lag/memory leak solution thread.

I'm currently running Zmod4 with Cognition B7, and almost everything seems to work perfectly for me. (Thank you DG and everyone else! Your work is nothing short of amazing!) I always install from a reset back to stock via Odin and complete wipe/master clear and have tried about every Rom when it becomes available. Everything usually installs perfectly and this setup was no exception. I do notice that the interface is smoother and the phone runs quicker in general with the ZMod4, but the lag is still there in the browser. It's not a placebo effect for me because I have Cog 2.1.4 on a friends Captivate at work as well as another friend that I have set up with a SRE with overclock and after every different setup I try, I always compare the browsers.
No matter which rom or configuration I am running the browsers on 2.1 based roms are always faster. They load a little faster which doesn't really bother me, its when you try to scroll up and down the heavier content pages that you get the hitches and lag. I've even tried different variations of the libwebcore.so files. Can't seem to get it running as smooth as 2.1. I figured it must have something to do with the fact that this is a leaked version of Froyo, but the same problem is persisting with others in the I9000 forum with the official release so I'm a little discouraged. The lag and hitches that I get, especially in larger content pages like engadget, pocketnow, huffingtonpost, etc. kinda drives me crazy when I see with my own eyes the browsers running completely smooth on the 2.1 setups.
I'm hoping with all the expertise and brain power we have amassed here in the developers section that someone may be able to figure out a way to fix this.
As a band aid to the real problem, I've tried running autokiller to free up more available memory with pretty limited results.

Why couldn't you just have continued discussion in this thread:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=803370
It's barely on MY page 2..

People usually disagree with me but I even found scrolling on busy webpages to be slower on my Nexus One with froyo vs eclair. This is with plugins either on demand or disabled.
I wouldn't expect it to get much better until scrolling/panning is offloaded to the GPU. Which should come first with Opera Mobile and hopefully the stock browser will support it in Gingerbread.
According to google engineers, the slow scrolling and hitching is due in part to garbage collection which ties up the CPU and keeps scrolling from being smooth.

Or maybe its because our froyo is leaked software?
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App

SkitchBeatz said:
Or maybe its because our froyo is leaked software?
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
this^ at least wait til froyo is released on the captivate before saying this.

maybe Flash is loading or something

richierich1212 said:
maybe Flash is loading or something
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I've tried it both ways, flash on and flash completely disabled. Its better when disabled of course, but still far more laggy than it should be. I don't think a lot of people notice it because:
A. many people don't frequently go to sites that have enough content to dramatically slow the browser down and most of all........
B. Almost no one has two, let alone three different Captivates available, each running a different Rom to get a side by side comparison so its harder to see and measure the real world difference.
Maybe my expectations are too high but I do frequent larger web sites and I know that the browser does not have the lag on the 2.1 roms so it irritates the bejeesum out of me.

Id imagine the more active content on web pages due to flash 10.1 is going have an effect on scroll speed. Ive seen the same thing on an OCed droid. I havent played with cog 2.2 much as i really enjoy how smooth 2.1.7 is and didnt even need to OC it. Now that they have a new lagfix for 2.2 im thinking about flashing 2.2 again.

\/icious said:
Id imagine the more active content on web pages due to flash 10.1 is going have an effect on scroll speed. Ive seen the same thing on an OCed droid. I havent played with cog 2.2 much as i really enjoy how smooth 2.1.7 is and didnt even need to OC it. Now that they have a new lagfix for 2.2 im thinking about flashing 2.2 again.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Your comments made it occur to me that while I have "disabled" flash in the browser settings, I've never completly tried to uninstall it....so I just did. With TiBu, so I'll run it this way for a bit and see what the real world effects are and report back.

FWIW, I didn't see a difference in scrolling between having plugins disabled and uninstalling Flash on my Nexus One. Haven't tried it on my Captivate for that reason.

dalingrin said:
People usually disagree with me but I even found scrolling on busy webpages to be slower on my Nexus One with froyo vs eclair. This is with plugins either on demand or disabled.
I wouldn't expect it to get much better until scrolling/panning is offloaded to the GPU. Which should come first with Opera Mobile and hopefully the stock browser will support it in Gingerbread.
According to google engineers, the slow scrolling and hitching is due in part to garbage collection which ties up the CPU and keeps scrolling from being smooth.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This is straight up discouraging. I thought it was just Samsung's crappy Froyo leaks, but this makes it sound like the Froyo browser just doesn't scroll as smoothly as the 2.1 browser.

I think something that kinda pisses me off with this browser hogging ram is the other problem that doesn't get brought up very much and when it does its shot down. The missing 208mb of ram that is supposedly being used by the gpu or whatever (I forget what I heard). With a browser that can easily creep up on 100 mb's of used ram with pages open and with give or take 150 mb's free at boot right there your down in the red zone where things start to lag. And the launcher takes 20 mb's so now your down to 30 free mob's. God forbid you wanna play angry birds too, you'd be screwed. So that makes multitasking not as efficient as it should be if we had the lost 208mb's. I do like this phone but I'm not real happy with Samsung. The galaxy s phones were advertised with 512 mb's, that's what we should get. People use to say that it would be available when froyo came out since eclair couldn't use all of the ram. Well here it is officially out on the i9000 and were still stuck with 304mb's.
Sorry about the rant. The only thing I miss from my iPhone 4 was booting it up and having 350 mb's free

di11igaf said:
I think something that kinda pisses me off with this browser hogging ram is the other problem that doesn't get brought up very much and when it does its shot down. The missing 208mb of ram that is supposedly being used by the gpu or whatever (I forget what I heard). With a browser that can easily creep up on 100 mb's of used ram with pages open and with give or take 150 mb's free at boot right there your down in the red zone where things start to lag. And the launcher takes 20 mb's so now your down to 30 free mob's. God forbid you wanna play angry birds too, you'd be screwed. So that makes multitasking not as efficient as it should be if we had the lost 208mb's. I do like this phone but I'm not real happy with Samsung. The galaxy s phones were advertised with 512 mb's, that's what we should get. People use to say that it would be available when froyo came out since eclair couldn't use all of the ram. Well here it is officially out on the i9000 and were still stuck with 304mb's.
Sorry about the rant. The only thing I miss from my iPhone 4 was booting it up and having 350 mb's free
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah, what they did is pretty deceiving. I usually had more free memory on my Aria and it only had 384 MB of RAM.

di11igaf said:
I think something that kinda pisses me off with this browser hogging ram is the other problem that doesn't get brought up very much and when it does its shot down. The missing 208mb of ram that is supposedly being used by the gpu or whatever (I forget what I heard). With a browser that can easily creep up on 100 mb's of used ram with pages open and with give or take 150 mb's free at boot right there your down in the red zone where things start to lag. And the launcher takes 20 mb's so now your down to 30 free mob's. God forbid you wanna play angry birds too, you'd be screwed. So that makes multitasking not as efficient as it should be if we had the lost 208mb's. I do like this phone but I'm not real happy with Samsung. The galaxy s phones were advertised with 512 mb's, that's what we should get. People use to say that it would be available when froyo came out since eclair couldn't use all of the ram. Well here it is officially out on the i9000 and were still stuck with 304mb's.
Sorry about the rant. The only thing I miss from my iPhone 4 was booting it up and having 350 mb's free
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The Galaxy S phones indeed have 512 MB of RAM. As for whether part of that is allocated by GPU (of which I believe no more than 32-64 MB must be for that), you still have to consider that android as an operating system sets aside a VERY LARGE chunk of RAM just for radio. It would be VERY STUPID of a phone to not set aside more than enough RAM to make sure the radio *always* gets top priority. Also, complaining about RAM getting "filled up" is a moot argument to begin with. Android honestly allocates RAM as fast as possible. It WANTS RAM to be as filled as possible, leaving between 50-75 MB free. If you use a task killer and kill everything, yeah you'll jump back up to 200+ MB free, but android will reallocate that memory just as fast to something else because that's what the OS is designed to do.
So, say we set aside 64 MB of RAM for VRAM, 128 MB for the GSM radio and other vital-to-operation-and-functionality processes that are specifically reserved and untouchable by us (these numbers are pulled out of my ass, for all I know the VRAM is 128 MB and the GSM only uses 75 MB... the point still stands) that drops us down to the ~300 MB range for user accessible functionality. Also, the browser RAM/smoothness issue you're referring to is a BUG because the froyo build is NON-FINAL, complaining about that is like saying "my knees hurt when I drag them on the ground." I assume this is something they will try to improve before final release, but I don't know, maybe they consider it "good enough."
On top of this, let's discuss the potential that maybe NONE of the RAM is set aside for the GPU and it runs itself. The complaint about a lack of the full 512 is also hard to discuss because HIGHMEM support was only added in 2.2 to have the full access to 512. Just because the potential to enable in 2.2 exists, doesn't mean they're taking advantage of it. I'd like to believe they are, so again, that drops back to the ~100 MB taken up by the GSM radio/phone functionality. As for whether this is "too much," that's not really up to you unless you want to go ahead and build a ROM from scratch. It's in the best interest of the company who made the phone to err on the side of caution and give it too much than too little. On top of that, the core OS allocates itself to set areas of RAM that you also can't change because man that would be stupid if they let you (want to see your phone crash? try to kill a process that controls the OS).
Basically, the RAM is there, we just don't have full userland access to all of it, it's pointless to complain. If it bugs you, take a stab at fixing it and prove you're better than samsung and make your own ROM.

I've looked high and low for a definitive answer on where the "missing" RAM is. I havent found one yet. I guess samsung would need to weigh in on that. But I do know that on my captivate going into quadrant system info says we have 311,xxx KB's of memory available to Android OS. A coworker has a verizon fascinate, his has 332,xxx KB's of memory. Another coworker has a droid incredible and his has 422,xxx KB's of memory. They all start with 512MB and obviously some of it is partitioned off and reserved for other functions such as GPU, ram disk, radio, etc.

derek4484 said:
I've looked high and low for a definitive answer on where the "missing" RAM is. I havent found one yet. I guess samsung would need to weigh in on that. But I do know that on my captivate going into quadrant system info says we have 311,xxx KB's of memory available to Android OS. A coworker has a verizon fascinate, his has 332,xxx KB's of memory. Another coworker has a droid incredible and his has 422,xxx KB's of memory. They all start with 512MB and obviously some of it is partitioned off and reserved for other functions such as GPU, ram disk, radio, etc.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah, we definitely have 512 MB of RAM. Samsung just seems to reserve more of it for other as yet unknown functions than other manufacturers.

Kaik541 said:
The Galaxy S phones indeed have 512 MB of RAM. As for whether part of that is allocated by GPU (of which I believe no more than 32-64 MB must be for that), you still have to consider that android as an operating system sets aside a VERY LARGE chunk of RAM just for radio. It would be VERY STUPID of a phone to not set aside more than enough RAM to make sure the radio *always* gets top priority. Also, complaining about RAM getting "filled up" is a moot argument to begin with. Android honestly allocates RAM as fast as possible. It WANTS RAM to be as filled as possible, leaving between 50-75 MB free. If you use a task killer and kill everything, yeah you'll jump back up to 200+ MB free, but android will reallocate that memory just as fast to something else because that's what the OS is designed to do.
So, say we set aside 64 MB of RAM for VRAM, 128 MB for the GSM radio and other vital-to-operation-and-functionality processes that are specifically reserved and untouchable by us (these numbers are pulled out of my ass, for all I know the VRAM is 128 MB and the GSM only uses 75 MB... the point still stands) that drops us down to the ~300 MB range for user accessible functionality. Also, the browser RAM/smoothness issue you're referring to is a BUG because the froyo build is NON-FINAL, complaining about that is like saying "my knees hurt when I drag them on the ground." I assume this is something they will try to improve before final release, but I don't know, maybe they consider it "good enough."
On top of this, let's discuss the potential that maybe NONE of the RAM is set aside for the GPU and it runs itself. The complaint about a lack of the full 512 is also hard to discuss because HIGHMEM support was only added in 2.2 to have the full access to 512. Just because the potential to enable in 2.2 exists, doesn't mean they're taking advantage of it. I'd like to believe they are, so again, that drops back to the ~100 MB taken up by the GSM radio/phone functionality. As for whether this is "too much," that's not really up to you unless you want to go ahead and build a ROM from scratch. It's in the best interest of the company who made the phone to err on the side of caution and give it too much than too little. On top of that, the core OS allocates itself to set areas of RAM that you also can't change because man that would be stupid if they let you (want to see your phone crash? try to kill a process that controls the OS).
Basically, the RAM is there, we just don't have full userland access to all of it, it's pointless to complain. If it bugs you, take a stab at fixing it and prove you're better than samsung and make your own ROM.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The official 2.2 release is out for the i9000 is out and it has a total of 304 mb of ram. The os takes a big chunk of this so with nothing running the most that is possible to access EVER for programs is about 170mb. Your launcher takes 20. The browser even on 2.1 with a couple of large pages loaded can easily take 100 mb. That leaves you with maybe 50mb available if you lucky. This is when things might get a little slow and the os will start killing off processes as it sees fit. So if you have a game open that you want to keep open in the background it wont. It will kill it which makes muttitasking very poor on a phone where its supposed to be above the rest. The point is we only have around 170 mb's available to the user. That's pretty ****ty. This is on the OFFICIAL froyo release for the i9000 and I highly doubt it will change for us. There is 208 mb's that are missing that should be user accessible. I don't care what uses it the fact is that I can't. The phone was advertised with 512 ram not 304 mb's with 208 vram or whatever. I traded an iphone 4 in for this phone and I still think that was a great decision as I love this phone. But at least when I booted my iphone 4 I had at least 350mb's of user accessible ram which we will not see. We have half of that and I think that sucks. Sorry for stating my opinion. Here's my old phone not even after a fresh boot and I could access all of it
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di11igaf said:
The official 2.2 release is out for the i9000 is out and it has a total of 304 mb of ram. The os takes a big chunk of this so with nothing running the most that is possible to access EVER for programs is about 170mb. Your launcher takes 20. The browser even on 2.1 with a couple of large pages loaded can easily take 100 mb. That leaves you with maybe 50mb available if you lucky. This is when things might get a little slow and the os will start killing off processes as it sees fit. So if you have a game open that you want to keep open in the background it wont. It will kill it which makes muttitasking very poor on a phone where its supposed to be above the rest. The point is we only have around 170 mb's available to the user. That's pretty ****ty. This is on the OFFICIAL froyo release for the i9000 and I highly doubt it will change for us. There is 208 mb's that are missing that should be user accessible. I don't care what uses it the fact is that I can't. The phone was advertised with 512 ram not 304 mb's with 208 vram or whatever. I traded an iphone 4 in for this phone and I still think that was a great decision as I love this phone. But at least when I booted my iphone 4 I had at least 350mb's of user accessible ram which we will not see. We have half of that and I think that sucks. Sorry for stating my opinion. Here's my old phone not even after a fresh boot and I could access all of it
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
blah blah blah, same old story. also, if you read, the JPM release got pulled and they're pushing a later release toward the start of November. Also, I included the option that the final release only gives 304 MB RAM to userland. if you're just going to ignore all my comments, then feel free. this is like complaining that you bought a computer with 2 GB of RAM and are mad that Windows says "I'm going to take 500 MB of that and run in there." go ahead, kill those windows processes and watch the system crumble... same thing on our phones. you're also ignoring the fact that I never said "208 mb to vram," good for you for getting just about everything else I said wrong. on top of that, comparing the iphone (a BSD-based mobile OS) against android (a linux-based mobile OS running inside a dalvik java VM) is like saying "why are burritos more filling than these peanuts?" iOS is designed to run on ONE base hardware by ONE base manufacturer, android is modular and designed to work on a VARIETY of platforms and tweaked as the manufacturer wants to.
Samsung advertises the phone with 512 MB of RAM, there is 512 MB of RAM in the phone. Where in their advertising ANYWHERE does it says "512 MB of userland RAM access"? You have nothing worth complaining about. If you miss your free RAM so much, go back to iphone or get a device that doesn't set aside so much of the RAM for *radio* (notice this word, radio, not VRAM... hell I even posited an option that says samsung may not be including the VRAM from the total at all). if you're upset your phone only grants you permission to 3/5ths of your total RAM, get a phone that doesn't. you aren't being "robbed," the hardware is there, it's Samsung's decision to set aside as much as they want for whatever they want. YOU CHOOSE TO ENCOURAGE THIS DECISION BY BUYING THEIR PRODUCT. If you don't like it, return the product, vote with your wallet. Get a device that allows more userland access to RAM and quit your *****ing and moaning.

326MB of RAM?

Just got a Samsung Vibrant.
I noticed the phone says I only have 326MB of total RAM. I thought this phone was suppose to have 512MB of RAM? Is 326MB normal or did I get an odd phone?

No that's right. It's all the kernel will allow us to use. Even with the unofficial froyo roms out, we only get 341mb.
Friends don't let friends flash drunk...

Cool. Thank you for the information.

Ravynmagi said:
Hmm... Seems strange they make Android phones with 512 and 768MB of RAM. Will the official Froyo be able to access more RAM?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It's also strange that hard drive manufacturers advertise a "500GB" hard drive when you really only get about 465GB of actual usable space.
Same concept. Froyo may be able to utilize more RAM than Eclair but you'll never get the full "512MB"

jrizk07 said:
It's also strange that hard drive manufacturers advertise a "500GB" hard drive when you really only get about 465GB of actual usable space.
Same concept. Froyo may be able to utilize more RAM than Eclair but you'll never get the full "512MB"
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I would say it is more like on your PC. You may have 4 GB installed, but when you look at it it will tell you you have only access to 3.5 GB because other hardware is using the memory, like a shared GPU etc.

jrizk07 said:
It's also strange that hard drive manufacturers advertise a "500GB" hard drive when you really only get about 465GB of actual usable space.
Same concept. Froyo may be able to utilize more RAM than Eclair but you'll never get the full "512MB"
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm getting tired of people making these retarded f****ng comparisons. Hard Drive capacities go down due to formating. Also, a 1 byte file takes up the smallest allocation unit on the drive, so space is wasted there as well. Better file systems are better about it, but unless you're writing raw data to the hard drive there's no way to avoid formatting it and losing space or writing data to it and losing space due to allocation boundaries. I've never heard of anyone Formatting RAM, have you? If the smallest allocation unit on the HDD is 4KB, then a 1Byte file will really take up 4KB on the drive's FS.
RAM is totally different. If there is 512 RAM there's 512 RAM. The only time you will see less than your amount of RAM on a computer is if the computer is allocatting a certain amount of RAM for use by an integrated graphics card (or something else).
Problem with our phones is that they're set up like the latter.
We don't have 512 RAM. We never have, and we never will. We haev 340'ish and the rest is GPU RAM. You're never going to run general applications on that RAM.

Oh. I had edited my reply because I had assumed I found my answer from this...
developer.android.com/sdk/android-2.2-highlights.html
"HIGHMEM support for RAM >256MB"
I had assumed that mean the official Froyo when we got it would have 512MB available.
So I guess I misunderstood their meaning there. So the 326MB is pretty much the max my applications will have to work with on this phone?
I guess I'm puzzled because I was in T-Mobile a couple days ago and I was going back and forth between getting this Vibrant and the MyTouch 4G. The MyTouch 4G advertises 768MB of RAM, while the Vibrant advertises 512MB of RAM.
So now I'm back to my original confusion. Why would HTC put 768MB of RAM in the MyTouch 4G if Android can't even use 512MB? *confused*
Ya'll compared it to the Windows XP limitation with only seeing 3.2-ish GB of RAM. But Dell doesn't install 8GB of RAM in Windows XP computers either. I guess I could maybe understand the 512MB phones if some of the memory is going towards video. But the 768MB phone doesn't make sense then.
This is my first Android device, so I'm still trying to figure out these things. Sorry for the dumb questions.

Ravynmagi said:
Oh. I had edited my reply because I had assumed I found my answer from this...
developer.android.com/sdk/android-2.2-highlights.html
"HIGHMEM support for RAM >256MB"
I had assumed that mean the official Froyo when we got it would have 512MB available.
So I guess I misunderstood their meaning there. So the 326MB is pretty much the max my applications will have to work with on this phone?
I guess I'm puzzled because I was in T-Mobile a couple days ago and I was going back and forth between getting this Vibrant and the MyTouch 4G. The MyTouch 4G advertises 768MB of RAM, while the Vibrant advertises 512MB of RAM.
So now I'm back to my original confusion. Why would HTC put 768MB of RAM in the MyTouch 4G if Android can't even use 512MB? *confused*
Ya'll compared it to the Windows XP limitation with only seeing 3.2-ish GB of RAM. But Dell doesn't install 8GB of RAM in Windows XP computers either. I guess I could maybe understand the 512MB phones if some of the memory is going towards video. But the 768MB phone doesn't make sense then.
This is my first Android device, so I'm still trying to figure out these things. Sorry for the dumb questions.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
First of all. There are no dumb question. Second. Android uses all of the RAM. But as the phone reserves memory for hardware and other system essential services, you will only be able to use a certain amount of the memory. In this case around 345 out of the 512. The rest is put away so that the OS can run stable etc.
So for the MyTouch 4G it says that there is 768 MB installed, but you won't see all of that. The phone will reserve certain amount for it's hardware and you will never be able to free it unless you know how to change the kernel.
Hope this clears any confusion up.

Ravynmagi said:
Ya'll compared it to the Windows XP limitation with only seeing 3.2-ish GB of RAM. But Dell doesn't install 8GB of RAM in Windows XP computers either. I guess I could maybe understand the 512MB phones if some of the memory is going towards video. But the 768MB phone doesn't make sense then.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
for xp, the memory limitation is due to 32bit memory addressing. 32bits can address a theoretical 4gb, however due to also addressing gpu memory and probably some other reasons xp can't address the entire 4gb and so you see 3.xGB.
i can't really speak to android or the vibrant, but i'm guessing (like others have said) we are losing some of our ram in a share with the gpu.

I think most people are missing the issue here.
The phones are advertised as having 512 MB RAM.
When you buy a computer, and it says 512, it comes with 512 (only exception is the one I stated - integrated graphics cards sharing system RAM - but that is usually listed on the Computer Spec sheet).
So, when they get a phone and it says 512 MB RAM, they expect for there to be 512 Application-accessible RAM on the device.
HTC adds more RAM to put the user closer to the advertised specs. Most other manufacturers do not.
So users end up with 326 MB RAM wondering if they got what they paid for.
Which... they really didn't if you use you common sense, but companies will always use technicalities tand semantics o defend their decisions and/or actions.

N8ter said:
I think most people are missing the issue here.
The phones are advertised as having 512 MB RAM.
When you buy a computer, and it says 512, it comes with 512 (only exception is the one I stated - integrated graphics cards sharing system RAM - but that is usually listed on the Computer Spec sheet).
So, when they get a phone and it says 512 MB RAM, they expect for there to be 512 Application-accessible RAM on the device.
HTC adds more RAM to put the user closer to the advertised specs. Most other manufacturers do not.
So users end up with 326 MB RAM wondering if they got what they paid for.
Which... they really didn't if you use you common sense, but companies will always use technicalities tand semantics o defend their decisions and/or actions.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I completely agree with you. In fact some of us in xda have discovered that sgs indeed has less than 512MB of RAM. We are still somehow trying to defend Samsung by say Galaxy TAB has more RAM (when Samsung advertise 512MB only for TAB)!
On a side note - Hard Drive capacity is measured in millions of bytes hence 500,000millionbytes
will be around 465GB only (unformated)!
Sent from my GT-I9000 using XDA App

I doubt ~170 mb is being allocated for the radio and for hardware addressing space. It's my opinion that the phone actually only comes with 384mb ram.

raduque said:
I doubt ~170 mb is being allocated for the radio and for hardware addressing space. It's my opinion that the phone actually only comes with 384mb ram.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
no.
10ch

Prankey said:
I completely agree with you. In fact some of us in xda have discovered that sgs indeed has less than 512MB of RAM. We are still somehow trying to defend Samsung by say Galaxy TAB has more RAM (when Samsung advertise 512MB only for TAB)!
On a side note - Hard Drive capacity is measured in millions of bytes hence 500,000millionbytes
will be around 465GB only (unformated)!
Sent from my GT-I9000 using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Many do list that but what makes the drives smaller is formatting. The raw size is what it is, but the formatted capacity is much less. You can ser this on sf cards easily. Format it as fat32 then ntfs, and the end (formatted) capacities will be different. Then play with allocation sizes as well ;p
If you have hordes of small files it can really eat inyo the space on ut hard drive, as well, since a file can only be as small as the smallest cluster size in the filesystem.
Even if they made the drive 1024mb x however many gb they say it is, that will be instantly cut fown tje minute you format a fs onto the drive. There is also space the fs reserves for system use, as well. Mft and such.
Sent from my SGH-T959 using XDA App

anthonys2r said:
no.
10ch
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
He's right hardware addrrssimg shouldn't need that much, and graphics in a phone shouldn't need that much either. Maybe so,eone should sue Samsumg for false advertisement and see what they say.
Sent from my SGH-T959 using XDA App

anthonys2r said:
no.
10ch
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You can "no." all you want, but unless you have proof to the contrary, I'm going to stick with my OPINION that the phone has 384mb.
There's no way in hell the Radio, hardware addressing space and/or GPU frame buffer use 170-180mb of the ram.

raduque said:
You can "no." all you want, but unless you have proof to the contrary, I'm going to stick with my OPINION that the phone has 384mb.
There's no way in hell the Radio, hardware addressing space and/or GPU frame buffer use 170-180mb of the ram.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I agree just checked and vibrant shows similar ram to htc aria, which has 384mb ram stock.
Sent from my SGH-T959 using XDA App

raduque said:
You can "no." all you want, but unless you have proof to the contrary, I'm going to stick with my OPINION that the phone has 384mb.
There's no way in hell the Radio, hardware addressing space and/or GPU frame buffer use 170-180mb of the ram.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
There is a thread in the i9k forum that details the amounts of ram reserved in the kernel source. Just about every feature on the phone has dedicated ram, weather or not it's currently in use. That plus what the kernel shows as available adds up to 512mb. It's stupid, but that's how it is. Poor and lazy software engineering, IMO. Unfortunately, doing the allocation in a sane way and having it work in android properly is very difficult without all of the source, which we will probably never have.
It's not really any better with other manufacturers. They all do it. I think they ought to be required to disclose user available ram amounts, but nobody cares what I think.

N8ter said:
I'm getting tired of people making these retarded f****ng comparisons. Hard Drive capacities go down due to formating. Also, a 1 byte file takes up the smallest allocation unit on the drive, so space is wasted there as well. Better file systems are better about it, but unless you're writing raw data to the hard drive there's no way to avoid formatting it and losing space or writing data to it and losing space due to allocation boundaries. I've never heard of anyone Formatting RAM, have you? If the smallest allocation unit on the HDD is 4KB, then a 1Byte file will really take up 4KB on the drive's FS.
RAM is totally different. If there is 512 RAM there's 512 RAM. The only time you will see less than your amount of RAM on a computer is if the computer is allocatting a certain amount of RAM for use by an integrated graphics card (or something else).
Problem with our phones is that they're set up like the latter.
We don't have 512 RAM. We never have, and we never will. We haev 340'ish and the rest is GPU RAM. You're never going to run general applications on that RAM.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I had 326 RAM .After installation of FROYO 2.2,my Galaxy can see only 304 RAm.Why?I expected to get more RAM with FROYO 2.2 Why did this happened?

N8ter said:
He's right hardware addrrssimg shouldn't need that much, and graphics in a phone shouldn't need that much either. Maybe so,eone should sue Samsumg for false advertisement and see what they say.
Sent from my SGH-T959 using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Maybe you should do it. You know, since you know exactly what you're talking about.

why does the vibrant not recognize all the ram even on 2.2

Guys, how can I get my samsung vibrant to recognize all the 512mb of ram. I thought froyo has all the software and kernels and stuff to recognize the full 512mb of my phone not just 308mb. Do I need to flash a new kernel or something. I have the nero v3 rom on my phone, with voodoo enabled. So how do we fix this?

308 MB you phone is showing you is the correct amount, your phone does have 512 MB of RAM total. However, part of that is used by the phone and android system to supply your phone's graphics card and other functions such as a RAM disk if I remembered correctly. In addition, You don't want your phone to run out of memory because you are running a game and missed that all important call right? well part of the RAM is reserved to keep the "phone" portion of the Android working.
It is a common misconception that Froyo will "unlock" this hidden RAM, but in reality we are already using all the RAM that came with the phone. The reason some HTC phone shows 512 MB of RAM is either because the phone is reading the "TotaL" amount of RAM or in the case of G2 the phone actually came with more than 512 MB of ram but advertised as 512 MB (the extra RAM is used in the same way as the Vibrant, GPU/Ram disk/Android, etc).

What about the iphone, my cousin always gets 300t mb of free memory on his iphone 4. Android can't be that much of a ram hog. By the way doesn't the power vr gpu have dedicated ram for it self, I man come on, its a high end phone. Samsung is really messing up on there phones.

My question is *why* do you need more free RAM? Are you really running out, ever? Don't think of it like a PC where you need free RAM as overhead when apps start utilizing more and more. Android will free up more RAM as necessary by killing apps that are preloaded in the background. I've never run into a situation where I've run out of memory, couldn't even tell you what happens when you do. I don't use task-killers, run a ton of widgets, and I've never seen it dip below 60-70mb free.

Kubernetes said:
My question is *why* do you need more free RAM? Are you really running out, ever? Don't think of it like a PC where you need free RAM as overhead when apps start utilizing more and more. Android will free up more RAM as necessary by killing apps that are preloaded in the background. I've never run into a situation where I've run out of memory, couldn't even tell you what happens when you do. I don't use task-killers, run a ton of widgets, and I've never seen it dip below 60-70mb free.[/QUOTE
Yes I do run out of ram. Every time I watch a flash video and while leaving no heavy ram using apps to be multitasked, after I finish my vigo and go back to my other apps I finder them killed. It gets on my nerves. I expected more out of 512mb. I also spent too much money for my phone for it to perform under shar what it's specified.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

I run autokiller and always have 150ish.free. even if I didn't run it I would never run out id ram even when I had my g1
Sent from my SGH-T959 using XDA App

So much for multitasking, right?
Phone has 384 app accessible ram. Typically runs with ~100ish free after a fresh boot with a stock ROM. The browser can take ~30mb, so that doesn't leave much to multitasking with. When ur phone starts auto killing performance decreases. They should have h put the aeverised ram in the phone, instead of playing the semantics game. Even Verizon updated their fascinate specs to change that to 384.
I'll make sure to check this before I buy my next phone in a couple weeks tho (soooo excited!!!).
Sent from my SGH-T959 using XDA App

N8ter said:
So much for multitasking, right?
Phone has 384 apparently accessible ram. Even Verizon updated their fascinate specs to change that.
Galaxy tab uses the same social and its alwaysvshowing 400+ MB ram on everyone I checked.
I'll make sure to check this before I buy my next phone in a couple weeks tho (soooo excited!!!).
Sent from my SGH-T959 using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This means that this is a software issue, not hardware because the tab has the same processor found in the vibrant. 400t is allot better than just 300, not only but the tab also requires more resources with it's 720p screen.

helikido said:
This means that this is a software issue, not hardware because the tab has the same processor found in the vibrant. 400t is allot better than just 300, not only but the tab also requires more resources with it's 720p screen.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It's not a software issue.
And yes, 100MB RAM in a smartphone is a lot.
It's like getting a computer with 4GB RAM and ripping a 2GB RAM stick out out of it.
There's 128 MB RAM that isn't accessible to the system The OS itself probably uses abut 100+ MB RAM, and once you start installing applications/services that start eating up resources.
Some say the 128 is dedicated graphics ram (fast graphics RAM to allow the Hummingbird to achieve it's faster GPU performance). What a waste. I'll make sure my next phone isn't built like a game console.
They should have at least added another 64MB RAM the way HTC did in the HD2/HD7.
The phone has as much App RAM as a mid-range Android device (think HTC Aria). It's factorable, especially if you want to multitask. Running multiple applications on this phone, I basically have to manage my apps they way I did on Windows Mobile (i.e. open task manager to FC the browser, etc.) because you don't want to be playing a game or doing anything somewhat important when the phone starts trying to auto-close background tasks to recover RAM (and some services will simply restart themselves immediately).
Good phone, bad execution in the software, and they should not have advertised it as having 512 RAM, because to anyone that isn't an idiot Graphics RAM is not synonymous with Application RAM, and 128 less RAM is quite a big chunk to be missing.

...Graphics RAM is not synonymous with Application RAM, and 128 less RAM is quite a big chunk to be missing.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Virtually every computer on the shelf at Wally-World and Best Buy do exactly this - the motherboard graphics chip uses system RAM to operate. Admittedly does not directly correlate to a phone, and they should make a disclosure, but there is ample precedent in the general marketplace.

I don't understand why some of you attribute a free RAM amount (or lack thereof) as a memory hog?
If RAM is used instead of slower disk I/O it translates to a better user experience, the OS is good on keeping the taps on the memory and clean the thrash by itself, but nothing can prevent poor coding and a single rouge app can become the memory hog independent of how much RAM your system has, it might eat all of it.

The real problem is that the phone has only about 150mb of free ram and that'd on boot up. If the phone does have some ram dedicated to the gpu from the system ram (known as shared ram) then why
Don't other android devices do that too, and the iphone has more free ram on boot up then what is user acsesable to me. I thought the gloriose sgx540 had it's own high end dedicated ram for graphics?

N8ter said:
So much for multitasking, right?
Phone has 384 app accessible ram. Typically runs with ~100ish free after a fresh boot with a stock ROM. The browser can take ~30mb, so that doesn't leave much to multitasking with. When ur phone starts auto killing performance decreases. They should have h put the aeverised ram in the phone, instead of playing the semantics game. Even Verizon updated their fascinate specs to change that to 384.
I'll make sure to check this before I buy my next phone in a couple weeks tho (soooo excited!!!).
Sent from my SGH-T959 using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If you hate your vibrant so much why do you spend so much time on the forums? Dont seem to contribute much so just go get a new phone and leave us alone.

ionic7 said:
If you hate your vibrant so much why do you spend so much time on the forums? Dont seem to contribute much so just go get a new phone and leave us alone.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
There is an ignore list feature on these forums

helikido said:
The real problem is that the phone has only about 150mb of free ram and that'd on boot up. If the phone does have some ram dedicated to the gpu from the system ram (known as shared ram) then why
Don't other android devices do that too, and the iphone has more free ram on boot up then what is user acsesable to me. I thought the gloriose sgx540 had it's own high end dedicated ram for graphics?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
And how is that a problem?
Do you have an immediate need for something that requires 150+ MB after the boot?
Here's an absolutely healthy linux system with 2GB of RAM:
Code:
free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2049868 1982076 67792 0 146988 840748
-/+ buffers/cache: 994340 1055528
Swap: 6008824 820 6008004
I will be worried if my swap is being used a lot, but using my memory on the system is good.

I agree with this. 512 advertised, 308 seen, 150 Available after a boot....my phone keeps running out of memory so often its sad. It can never run my music player and my gps software at the same time. When I switch between the 2 apps, it closes the other one and its really really sad to see. ****ty job samsung, ****ty job. I hope the galaxy s mod gets ported for the ram which opens 338mb. At least its something.
Sent from my SGH-T959 using XDA App

}{Alienz}{ said:
It can never run my music player and my gps software at the same time.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I just went on a 700+ mile car trip with the music player and gps navigation software running the entire time. No problem. Was even able to simultaneously play games while my wife was driving.

}{Alienz}{ said:
I agree with this. 512 advertised, 308 seen, 150 Available after a boot....my phone keeps running out of memory so often its sad. It can never run my music player and my gps software at the same time. When I switch between the 2 apps, it closes the other one and its really really sad to see. ****ty job samsung, ****ty job. I hope the galaxy s mod gets ported for the ram which opens 338mb. At least its something.
Sent from my SGH-T959 using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
you have a rouge app/apps running that memory hog your phone, getting 30MB of more available RAM will not save it. You need to find what is hogging your phone, I am yet to see a message that my phone is low on memory, sometimes I do a lot of browsing, txt, mytracks and playing music with Pandora or stock player at the same time and it never complained that it was low on memory to run these.

ionic7 said:
If you hate your vibrant so much why do you spend so much time on the forums? Dont seem to contribute much so just go get a new phone and leave us alone.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Who said that I hate my phone.I'm only truong to find out shar mashes it not recognize all it's ram. In this era, ram is a huge factor to run apps and most importantly newer os updates like ginger bread and honey comb. Don't wanna run out of ram right when you boot up your phone don't you? And if the tab can recognize more ram than this then this means it does gave something to do with software. I guess we have to wait for samsung to release froyo, because im sure that they will gave all threw tweaks that will boost this phone very high, bedside from shar I've noticed, all the,roms out thete dont really boost this phone allot. How do I know,i gave nero v3 and that only boosted me to 1137 on quadrant from 2.1 and with voodo enabled I get 1500 max on quadrant. Oclf the same thing too. so all I'm saying is that it's definitely a software issue. Pretty sure android does not hog 400mbt. And no sgx has its own ram for sure.

I still don't get how you're running out of RAM. Right now I've got Winamp streaming through BT and have started streaming a Flash video. Also running are XDA and Maps. No hiccups.
Sent from my SGH-T959 using XDA App

2GB of RAM unnecessary?! LOL

This is the 4th time I've opened my task manager today and realized I was using over a gig. It easy to use over a gig when its there
Sent from my SPH-L710 using xda app-developers app

a phone OS using more ram than Vista??? not a good sign. God where are the AOSP roms already :crying:

Kernel knows it has more memory available so apps are more likely to stay in their suspended state, rather than removed from memory.
But I enjoy the 2GB of ram for sure.

dardani89 said:
a phone OS using more ram than Vista??? not a good sign. God where are the AOSP roms already :crying:
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Using RAM is not bad; needing RAM is bad. Android 4.0 can easily run with less than 400 MB, but some things can be a little faster when they don't have to constantly reload.

stuff said:
Kernel knows it has more memory available so apps are more likely to stay in their suspended state, rather than removed from memory.
But I enjoy the 2GB of ram for sure.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This. Everything switches back instantly!!
One of the most frustrating parts of the HTC OneX for me was when i was reading a long page of comments on sites like the verge or typing up a forum post. If i left the browser to reply to a text or facebook notification, and then returned to the browser it would always reload a page, and at the top.
Even the (heavy) Sense 4 launcher would have to load up every now and then.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I747

Voltage Spike said:
Using RAM is not bad; needing RAM is bad. Android 4.0 can easily run with less than 400 MB, but some things can be a little faster when they don't have to constantly reload.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
i wasn't making fun of android, i was making fun of touchwiz. too much bloat.

If the RAM will mean Nova Launcher wont reload itself as much as it currently does on my Incredible, then that's reason enough for me.

Having had the 1X for a month the 2 gb ram was one of the reasons I switched.

The 2GB of ram (and LTE) has been excessively downplayed by the International crowd because..well..they don't have it. The fact is the 2GB of ram should allow a stock phone to reload things much less. If you want to look forward 6 months to a year, I think the difference will be potentially much larger when we start to see creative devs tweaking their kernels to really use this extra ram. This is a ground breaking hardware move. We haven't even really begun to see what is possible. Judging any of these based on stock software at release is pointless. Think about how much better other phones have gotten after a few OTA updates....this device, especially with the extra ram is really well equipped for a long time.
Sent from my DROIDX using xda premium

jamesnmandy said:
The 2GB of ram (and LTE) has been excessively downplayed by the International crowd because..well..they don't have it. The fact is the 2GB of ram should allow a stock phone to reload things much less. If you want to look forward 6 months to a year, I think the difference will be potentially much larger when we start to see creative devs tweaking their kernels to really use this extra ram. This is a ground breaking hardware move. We haven't even really begun to see what is possible. Judging any of these based on stock software at release is pointless. Think about how much better other phones have gotten after a few OTA updates....this device, especially with the extra ram is really well equipped for a long time.
Sent from my DROIDX using xda premium
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This ^^^
Truth
XDA Mobile

By the time any phone will actually use 2gb of ram, im sure most of us will have moved on to a new phone already. Of course having the extra ram is good for bragging rights, but does it actually mean anything? I'll say no, but im sure some will argue that.

shook187 said:
By the time any phone will actually use 2gb of ram, im sure most of us will have moved on to a new phone already. Of course having the extra ram is good for bragging rights, but does it actually mean anything? I'll say no, but im sure some will argue that.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
they already make use of 1.1-1.2GB of ram out of the box running all stock software.......imagine if custom roms/kernels were available that make use of it....it's not far off....."by the time any phone will use" is closer than you think

jamesnmandy said:
they already make use of 1.1-1.2GB of ram out of the box running all stock software.......imagine if custom roms/kernels were available that make use of it....it's not far off....."by the time any phone will use" is closer than you think
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This is good in theory but everyone on here is talking like we have been missing two gigs all this time in our phones. If you are coming to the S3 from a single core phone of course this is night and day. My SGSII has NEVER.....I repeat NEVER run out of memory lost track multitasking or had to close out multiple apps to make room for more.....how many apps does one need sitting in a suspended state?.....I have 5 or 6 apps open at any given time with PLENTY of room for more...sure the extra ram is nice to have, but its completely unnecessary ....dual cores with a gig of ram have NO problem doing heavy multitasking .....ask anyone running as SGSII or Gnex.
The extra ram in the S3 is there to offset the loss of quadcore....its a nice helping hand to the Krait chip but not necessary for everyday multitasking that the average person does.....I don't know what phones alot of you guys are coming from but from the sounds of these posts they were serious under achievers.
Sent from........Somewhere In Time

tylerdurdin said:
This is good in theory but everyone on here is talking like we have been missing two gigs all this time in our phones. If you are coming to the S3 from a single core phone of course this is night and day. My SGSII has NEVER.....I repeat NEVER run out of memory lost track multitasking or had to close out multiple apps to make room for more.....how many apps does one need sitting in a suspended state?.....I have 5 or 6 apps open at any given time with PLENTY of room for more...sure the extra ram is nice to have, but its completely unnecessary ....dual cores with a gig of ram have NO problem doing heavy multitasking .....ask anyone running as SGSII or Gnex.
The extra ram in the S3 is there to offset the loss of quadcore....its a nice helping hand to the Krait chip but not necessary for everyday multitasking that the average person does.....I don't know what phones alot of you guys are coming from but from the sounds of these posts they were serious under achievers.
Sent from........Somewhere In Time
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
i think the reason you never saw your device running out of room is likely because the system knew how much memory it had to work with and was always adjusting things to accommodate as much memory....if the system had more memory available to it it can behave differently....it's not about "how many apps one needs in a suspended state", it's about "the more apps you can keep in a suspended state the quicker the apps will run for the user"
i know this isn't x86 and it's not windows, but the analogy still stands, consider Windows 7
if you build a pc using it with 2Gb of ram it will run just fine, it will use somewhere around 1Gb of ram sitting idle, using it for the prefetch cache to be ready to launch your most used apps while maintaining a safe amount of memory for sudden useage/overhead
if you upgrade that same pc to 4Gb of ram, it will use close to 2Gb at idle.....it's not quite linear as that but you can see a direct correlation between available memory and memory utilization
the Linux kernel behind android appears to work very similarly, it will keep the most called upon code in local memory so that it launches faster when next called upon. the more memory available to the kernel, the less time it can spend killing apps in order to maintain that same level of free memory for the unexpected execution of a new app
the more memory it has, if it is written/compiled to take advantage of it, the more potential for performance is there.
I would say the 2Gb of memory is more easily utilized than the additional redundant cores in the Exynos kit. I have been looking for some real data on Android and SMP but I know recently Intel made a rare public statement about how it is not ready for even dual core utilization. I don't think Intel would make such a specific claim without data. I don't think the Exynos users are really getting much good at all from the four cores other than synthetic benchmark scores and I think they could see more benefits down the road from more memory than redundant A9 older technology additional cores.
disclaimer: I am still learning about all this so if some smart guy comes along and sees something above that is not quite right....it's not because I am making this up....it's what I understand to be true based on reading.

jamesnmandy said:
i think the reason you never saw your device running out of room is likely because the system knew how much memory it had to work with and was always adjusting things to accommodate as much memory....if the system had more memory available to it it can behave differently....it's not about "how many apps one needs in a suspended state", it's about "the more apps you can keep in a suspended state the quicker the apps will run for the user"
i know this isn't x86 and it's not windows, but the analogy still stands, consider Windows 7
if you build a pc using it with 2Gb of ram it will run just fine, it will use somewhere around 1Gb of ram sitting idle, using it for the prefetch cache to be ready to launch your most used apps while maintaining a safe amount of memory for sudden useage/overhead
if you upgrade that same pc to 4Gb of ram, it will use close to 2Gb at idle.....it's not quite linear as that but you can see a direct correlation between available memory and memory utilization
the Linux kernel behind android appears to work very similarly, it will keep the most called upon code in local memory so that it launches faster when next called upon. the more memory available to the kernel, the less time it can spend killing apps in order to maintain that same level of free memory for the unexpected execution of a new app
the more memory it has, if it is written/compiled to take advantage of it, the more potential for performance is there.
I would say the 2Gb of memory is more easily utilized than the additional redundant cores in the Exynos kit. I have been looking for some real data on Android and SMP but I know recently Intel made a rare public statement about how it is not ready for even dual core utilization. I don't think Intel would make such a specific claim without data. I don't think the Exynos users are really getting much good at all from the four cores other than synthetic benchmark scores and I think they could see more benefits down the road from more memory than redundant A9 older technology additional cores.
disclaimer: I am still learning about all this so if some smart guy comes along and sees something above that is not quite right....it's not because I am making this up....it's what I understand to be true based on reading.
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Click to collapse
You are pretty spot on for the most part....but the difference here lies in the amount of ram needed to cache applications and perform extended tasks.....the reason my GSII never runs out of memory is because it has plenty for any array of tasks. While caching 8 applications I use all day...and still have anywhere from 325 to 400 megs available for any other array tasks .....I just can't see where I would need more.
As for your earlier mention of custom roms.....this becomes even less necessary ....right now a stock GS3 is using over a gig.....that's because its loaded chock full O'carrier BS on top of all samsungs layers of bloat and BS "features"....you strip all that crap out and you have a 275mb OS and more ram than you will know what to do with.
Bloat is the only thing requiring this extra ram because its running at system level which is also why Sense stuffed a dagger in the H1X.
Performance for launching is helped greatly by the processor for anything not in ram and the threshold for my phone is 64mb....which means my phone will not start killing of apps until that's met.....I could not seem to hit it just messing around.
Sent from........Somewhere In Time

tylerdurdin said:
You are pretty spot on for the most part....but the difference here lies in the amount of ram needed to cache applications and perform extended tasks.....the reason my GSII never runs out of memory is because it has plenty for any array of tasks. While caching 8 applications I use all day...and still have anywhere from 325 to 400 megs available for any other array tasks .....I just can't see where I would need more.
As for your earlier mention of custom roms.....this becomes even less necessary ....right now a stock GS3 is using over a gig.....that's because its loaded chock full O'carrier BS on top of all samsungs layers of bloat and BS "features"....you strip all that crap out and you have a 275mb OS and more ram than you will know what to do with.
Bloat is the only thing requiring this extra ram because its running at system level which is also why Sense stuffed a dagger in the H1X.
Performance for launching is helped greatly by the processor for anything not in ram and the threshold for my phone is 64mb....which means my phone will not start killing of apps until that's met.....I could not seem to hit it just messing around.
Sent from........Somewhere In Time
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Click to collapse
right on, yeah i agree it's overkill right now. I just think within the next two years, we will easily see multiple areas where having more is better than having less. I am thinking way outside the box but I am seeing visions of custom kernels that are doing some extreme caching, even running a VM type environment.....actually I am thinking of running Android and perhaps there will be an opportunity to run Windows RT or some desktop version of Linux simultaneously......something a device with even four cores and 1GB of ram would have a hard time doing.....and that's not to say it would run well on the S4 US version either, but it is certainly more suited for it

jamesnmandy said:
right on, yeah i agree it's overkill right now. I just think within the next two years, we will easily see multiple areas where having more is better than having less. I am thinking way outside the box but I am seeing visions of custom kernels that are doing some extreme caching, even running a VM type environment.....actually I am thinking of running Android and perhaps there will be an opportunity to run Windows RT or some desktop version of Linux simultaneously......something a device with even four cores and 1GB of ram would have a hard time doing.....and that's not to say it would run well on the S4 US version either, but it is certainly more suited for it
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I like the way you think
Sent from........Somewhere In Time

tylerdurdin said:
You are pretty spot on for the most part....but the difference here lies in the amount of ram needed to cache applications and perform extended tasks.....the reason my GSII never runs out of memory is because it has plenty for any array of tasks. While caching 8 applications I use all day...and still have anywhere from 325 to 400 megs available for any other array tasks .....I just can't see where I would need more.
As for your earlier mention of custom roms.....this becomes even less necessary ....right now a stock GS3 is using over a gig.....that's because its loaded chock full O'carrier BS on top of all samsungs layers of bloat and BS "features"....you strip all that crap out and you have a 275mb OS and more ram than you will know what to do with.
Bloat is the only thing requiring this extra ram because its running at system level which is also why Sense stuffed a dagger in the H1X.
Performance for launching is helped greatly by the processor for anything not in ram and the threshold for my phone is 64mb....which means my phone will not start killing of apps until that's met.....I could not seem to hit it just messing around.
Sent from........Somewhere In Time
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Click to collapse
You are partially right. My sensation xl and my friends galaxy note works multitask pretty well with just 768mb and 1GB ram. But that was on Gingerbread. Once we upgraded to ICS multitasking suffers tremendously. He even blamed me for persuading him to do the update. For GB 1GB is enough. For ICS 1GB is not enough if you want the best multitasking experience.

nativestranger said:
You are partially right. My sensation xl and my friends galaxy note works multitask pretty well with just 768mb and 1GB ram. But that was on Gingerbread. Once we upgraded to ICS multitasking suffers tremendously. He even blamed me for persuading him to do the update. For GB 1GB is enough. For ICS 1GB is not enough if you want the best multitasking experience.
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I have to blame both device and OS....I am running ICS on my GS2 and have not even seen the slightest difference.....although my battery is just slightly worse.
Sent from........Somewhere In Time

nativestranger said:
For GB 1GB is enough. For ICS 1GB is not enough if you want the best multitasking experience.
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You must be running some early leeks cause some of my phones like the GS2 and the evo 3d are running ICS flawlessly.

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