How much ram should my note 3 be using?

Clearing apps won't improve battery efficiency. The opposite in fact: it will take more time and energy to reload them than if they were still hibernating in memory.

Android memory management is not the same as Windows. The slogan is "free RAM is wasted RAM". Just leave it to look after itself.

I've not played with a Note 3 but are you sure the camera start time isn't normal? It's different hardware and a different app from the Apple device, and camera load times do vary between phones quite a bit.

I must admit I've optimised this device to quite a large extent, but I don't think I've ever waited 4 seconds for any application to open, even before I started tweaking the device.

My stock camera opens up at around a second, that's with 206 applications installed & counted in the app drawer & quite a few background applications operating, such as apps that popup when an email or text arrives, which have slowed the phone, it would be faster if I just had the stock applications installed when it was new, like the iPhone 6 you tested.

I don't think you are going to get much optimising done if you aren't rooted to be honest, but I think you can optimise the usage of your phone's memory & CPU indirectly by uninstalling un-efficient apps with super apps that can do the same thing as 3 or 4 of the applications you have installed, or apps with smaller file sizes.

For example I uninstalled a popular launcher which had nearly 5 MB Apk size which was then inflated once it got installed & unpacked. I noticed that I didn't need as much features as we're available so I decided to see if I could find a launcher with a solution APK size, & found Lightning Launcher eXtreme which has a 722 KB APK size. Now I notice that pressing home goes straight home instead of waiting a few moments.

The same with Now Browser Pro which is 722 KB, as opposed to some other web browsers which can reach over 20 MB in APK size alone, I find Now Browser Pro the fastest, although it might not have some of the features that some of the other browsers do. For that purpose the developer decided to keep the file size down & build another Web browser called Now Browser Extended, which has more features, and allows people to buy the version they want/need while keeping the file size of Now Browser Pro down.

You can see the file size of the APK in the Google Play store by clicking on "Read More" & scrolling all the way to the bottom until you see the word "size" & a number next to it.

Probably the TouchWiz UI. I've heard about it being a RAM hog.

Bhamilton0347 said:

Probably the TouchWiz UI. I've heard about it being a RAM hog.

Click to expand...

You are right it is, but it doesn't matter. RAM usage matters not one iota in Android, Hadron is spot on. Leave any RAM saving tweaks you are tempted to try alone, unless you want a laggy mess, but with large amounts of free RAM sat doing nothing.

dynomot said:

You are right it is, but it doesn't matter. RAM usage matters not one iota in Android, Hadron is spot on. Leave any RAM saving tweaks you are tempted to try alone, unless you want a laggy mess, but with large amounts of free RAM sat doing nothing.

Click to expand...

You get the general idea, basically leave Android alone to do its job. I'm probably about to state the obvious to most, but I feel that to make things clear to readers just learning Android basics I should put this in a little different way...

True that in Android/Linux unused RAM is considered wasted RAM (to a point anyway, about 25% should normally be free). But RAM usage *does* matter, because it's always preferable to have a lean, mean system.

For a simple example, say a developer writes an app - a browser, for instance - and it uses about 1.5GB of RAM average. But just before releasing it, he realizes that with a major change in the code he can cut that in half, to about ,75GB.

Should he rewrite before releasing or figure screw it, too much work and RAM usage doesn't matter one iota anyway. Android will fill RAM regardless, right?

He should rewrite, because even though Android will use the extra .75GB either way, if he rewrites then that .75GB can be used for other needs. And maybe his browser will load and run just a tick quicker.