Memory Usage

[daveybaby]

Had my hero a few weeks now, and i've noticed that available memory gradually shrinks regardless of any app killing i do.

I'm using TaskPanel X to kill background tasks occasionally if i feel the phone is slowing down a bit. I have a fairly small ignore list of about a dozen core functions (e.g. touchflo, mail, calendar, clock PC Sync etc) After a fresh reboot it usually reports 96MB free after killing all other apps, but after about a week without a reboot this can shrink to around 40MB.

I've also noticed that by this point the phone is starting to get laggy, and today i got a 'no reception' X on the signal meter which refused to go away until i rebooted the phone (after about an hour). I guess there's a chance that there was a genuine network outage which coincidentally came back at the exact time i rebooted the phone, but... hmmm... unlikely.

Starting to think there are still cumulative problems with the firmware, and if these can cause failures of core functionality like radio reception then i have to wonder if this is the cause of the things like the lost text messages that people are reporting.

It's not a show stopper by any means, just not sure at the moment whether to start rebooting evey day or so as a matter of course, or to leave it for as long as possible each time and try to identify a pattern of cause and effect.

Anybody else had this sort of experience? Anyone know of any apps (or even core functions) which tend to cause memory leaks?

 

[prepbgg]

Presumably you've looked at the amount of memory being used for application caches, shown clearly in Settings->Applications->Application settings, which you can sort in size order. The main memory hogs on my phone are Browser, Albums and Google Maps but there are quite a few apps that, after a few weeks' use have stashed away a megabyte or more in their caches.

 

[daveybaby]

I think the information under settings->applications refers to storage (i.e. flash) rather than memory (i.e. RAM). These figures dont change after a reboot, and clearing 8MB out of my browser cache didnt increase the amount of memory available.

However i did just discover that the reason i was losing reception may well have been because my SIM was coming loose within the phone itself - the mechanism for locking it into place doesnt seem to lock too well. Might have to add some blu-tack to it to keep it in place.

Still, i have to wonder where this memory is going

 

[jimeller]

Presumably you've looked at the amount of memory being used for application caches, shown clearly in Settings->Applications->Application settings, which you can sort in size order. The main memory hogs on my phone are Browser, Albums and Google Maps but there are quite a few apps that, after a few weeks' use have stashed away a megabyte or more in their caches.

wow, great tip by the way. that never occured to me. ive now managed to increase my internal memory by around 30MB by just clearing caches of various apps.

on another note, what happens when data is cleared as opposed to cache? its in the same menu.

 

[prepbgg]

what happens when data is cleared as opposed to cache? its in the same menu.

Good question. I haven't experimented for fear of losing data that matters. Luckily, the amounts are not nearly so large as the cache amounts on my phone.