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Help RAM status. How much you have free?

puchasr

Newbie
Oct 5, 2012
38
6
Lately my Tmobile SGH-T989 becomes sluggish at times, it freezes from a couple of seconds to several (10 secs or more) if I wait I can keep using the phone normally after that, sometimes I had several apps running when this happen, maybe that's the reason? The Tmobile phone includes a widget that shows the amount of RAM being used by the phone, with no apps running on the foreground it shows 590/768 of RAM being used. When I press "Clear Memory" "14 apps closed" appears for a second and the RAM goes down to 540/768 but slowly climbs up again. I went to 'Settings, Applications, Running' and I have about 30 apps running in the background, some like "swipe" I think is the keyboard and its ok, but there's others like: Slacker, Social Hub, T-Mobile video chat, etc. So what is a "normal" amount of RAM when no apps are open in the foreground and what app you guys recommend to keep some of the apps from running in the background since these I would think are using some of the RAM also. Any suggestions are welcome, thanks.
 
Sounds like most of it is bloatware, which you can get rid of if you're rooted. As for running apps and memory, I wouldn't worry about it. For a long time, I obsessed over the same thing, constantly killing background apps and freeing up memory. The thing is that android handles physical resources differently than computers. If you minimize an IE window playing a Youtube video on a computer, it will still keep playing the video and use up the resources it needs to do so. Android handles programs in a 'stack', devoting the most resources only to what's on being used on top, so if you close a video on android, it doesn't close the app like windows would, it just stops it from using resources it doesn't need at the time, but stores it in the stack so that you can quickly go back to it if you want. If you start running low on resources, android automatically frees up memory to run what it needs to on top of the stack by freeing up resources from apps further down the stack in a prioritized fashion. So you're phone may say that you're using 75% of your memory, but the phone can free up as much as it needs to at an on-demand basis.

It took a while for me to accept this and just completely forget about what's in the background, but since I've gotten away from the app killer habits, my battery life and performance have noticeably increased.
 
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