Help Memory decreases dramatically when sending or receiving SMS

[badoerfan]

I've got a very odd problem with my Desire. Whenever my phone receives a message, or when I send one, it hangs for a period of time. During this time I can get out of the messages app, and I've noticed it gives me a 'low memory' notification (I have 25MB free, so it should be fine). It gets to the stage where it gives me a second notification telling me there's not enough memory even to save the SMS.

Then it usually suddenly rights itself, and writes the SMS to the memory and that's that - but this is frustrating as it takes several minutes, or sometimes doesn't and I have to reboot.

What I have noticed is, when going into the menu and looking at how much free space there is, it's decreasing dramatically. For example, I look at it and it's 22MB. I come out of the menu, and go straight back in, and it's down to 20MB. It keeps decreasing all the way down (I can keep looking at it) to 44KB, which is when it gives me the second warning above. Then it suddenly bounces back to 25MB.

Does anyone have any ideas what on earth is going on, and how I stop it? It's meaning that effectively my phone is useless for sending or receiving SMSs. Phone calls, using internet, tweeting, Facebook, all that's absolutely fine. I'm wondering if it's having some issues writing to the internal memory of the phone.

Thanks in advance for any tips or thoughts.

 

[Usta]

25MB is already low. Probably some application is trying to sync/download data to your phone, but after reaching low memory it resets the download cache.

I'd suggest to remove some of the large apps from your phone (temporarily) to clean some space.
The check which app is using how much data (Manage Applications - sort by size).
Check also the size of your Contacts, Messaging and FaceBook applications.
When the space is decreasing, do you see anything on the notifications bar?

 

[badoerfan]

On the notifications bar, when it gets low I get the usual icon about it being low on memory (the little disc and exclamation mark).

It's been at around 25MB for a while and been working fine, so I'd be surprised if that's it, but I'll take the advice and try deleting a few things. The largest thing by far is the Dialer Storage, but if I clear the data in that it'll delete all my SMSs and contacts, right?

 

[Usta]

Dialer storage must be very tiny, around 300kb, so that is obviously an issue.
SMSs are in Messaging, so you should have no problem to clear Dialer storage.