What else can eat up my ram?

boyo1991

boyo1991

Android Enthusiast
May 26, 2011
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Hey everyone, lately I've been on a performance kick. I do have some widgets but I don't have a live wallpaper. Live wallpapers take up sooo much ram. My question is do some launchers take more ram than others? Also do widgets really take a lot of ram?

I am running go launcher EX on my HTC evo v 3D, I hate HTC sence so I've been trying my best to make it custom. I have 800mb of ram, but when I use task management, I usually only sit around 400 free. Obviously some is by the os, some is by the launcher, and I'm sure some by the widgets as well. But does that really take 400 mb away?

Thanks for any input
 
Do live wallpapers really stay in RAM while youre not on homescreen mate? If so, id imagine android would kick them out when it needed more RAM :thumbup:
Disclosure: im a live wallpaper addict lol. Loving 3d Image Live Wallpaper just now :)
 
chanchan05 said:
Go Launcher is slow and bloated. It really would not matter how much free RAM you have. And having more free RAM wont make your phone faster. Repeatedly clearing RAM via task management also may cause the device to run slower.
Click to expand...

Perhaps he merely wants to optimize the RAM by uninstalling the biggest memory-leaking / RAM hogging programs so that Android can fit more stuff in the RAM the way it wants to?
 
depends on how much RAM you got. if you're like me and your phone only has ~256MB, it isn't long before you install enough apps and notice extreme lag and crashing. too many apps and too many 'background receivers' as they are called (background services which are part of apps) try to fit in too little RAM and Android keeps calling up garbage collection over and over again which slows the device down. in worst case scenarios, you end up having random restarts when the device simply cannot find enough memory and kernel panics.

i had to root to fix that by disabling any unnecessary background receivers and only left the ones i use on. this reduced the amount of total RAM used up and kept just enough free to avoid the constant garbage collection issue. logcat is clear now too. everything is fluid and smooth. my phone is best at 75% or 80% used RAM. any above that and around 86% calls up garbage collection (Android's built-in task manager) and this can slow the device down if it has repeated calls when some apps try to restart when Android kills them, or if it ends up killing your launcher and you wait to have it redraw again.

To answer Funkylogic's post about live wallpapers, they're not supposed to keep running if the screen is off and device locked or if you're in another app. if you use a fancy one like i have my 3D deer one, when you leave an app or wake your device up, you will notice a blank wallpaper for a second then your live wallpaper displays. this also keeps it from eating the battery. if it is running anyway when not in use or if locked, i suggest contacting the Dev to get him/her to fix that.
 
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Thanks man :beer:
Yeah i always check for wakelocks with any app :)

Is that a payed LWP youre using?
Have you tried the one i was talkin bout (maybe $1.50 in US money)? I lets you set your own background but makes it look like its "behind" everything else in the screen for a 3d "parallax" effect as the phone is moved using the gyro sensor or whatever. Its really smooth and unbuggy though compared to beta or free apps ive used that try to do the same thing :beer:
 
what i use is called 'Forest HD' which is a pay app. i try to buy apps as the free versions tend to sneak in some kind of adware or airpush stuff and the little ad banners can cause some degree of lag. the pay versions are far more polished in my experience.

Being that my favorite animal is deer, Forest HD is wonderful (albeit it won't run on my phone as the custom ROM i use seems to have the live wallpaper apk removed and i cannot find it available as a separate download) but i use it on my tablets and it pans around and such. i think it has about as many scenes (all parts of one large scene that goes on forever like a game) as home screens. switching from one home screen to the next is like 'walking' a few more feet left or right in the 'world'. in the many different sections are other animals, more deer, butterflies, streams with fish swimming, rabbits, etc. it also changes with the time of day.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dualboot.apps.forest&hl=en

 
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Joelgp83 said:
Perhaps he merely wants to optimize the RAM by uninstalling the biggest memory-leaking / RAM hogging programs so that Android can fit more stuff in the RAM the way it wants to?
Click to expand...

This. I'd like to just get rid of the worst offenders. So I can keep smooth transitions and nice animations without task management every half hour forty five mins lol
 
If rooted try disabling some of the background receivers with ROM toolbox. That made my cheap Precedent as speedy and fluid as an iPhone. And I'm running under clocked at 480MHz! It also disabled the in-app *thing* that displayed app not responding prompts if something takes a long time to load.
 
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Redraws are caused not by Go Launcher but by Android killing Go Launcher because it runs at a priority level of six despite it acting as a launcher. Tsf shell has a built in feature that keeps it running so Android doesn't kill it in out of memory situations. I think Nova and most others do that as well.
 
Okay, here's what my solution was. I got rid of go launcher, and bought the app "memory booster" despite its wonky name, its the best task management and ram manager I've ever bought. I got the lite version which didn't allow for automated cleaners. It abides by the garbage collection policy and won't do a clean until the policy is met. It gives a realtime readout and even does a quick clean when I lock the device. (Not a full one, I have that set for every ten minutes) the only thing I would like to see is it not be in my recent apps list, because if I take it off of the recent apps list it does close (like it should) and won't run in the background for automated cleans. I'm a bit ocd when it comes to my recent apps list, but this app is too good in so many other areas, I think I can deal with the little ram consumption it takes to constantly keep it clean instead of leaving it to me to figure out lol
 
Much better to use an auto start app to manage your phone than using a task killer, Google specifically states not to use a task killer since FroYo, I'm pretty sure that they know what they're talking about. :rolleyes:
OB
 
Even with the system persistent setting enabled in go launcher it gets killed by Android. It is an experimental feature either way. Because it uses a load of RAM on some phones it gets killed while in another app which causes the lag when you back out of the app.

While smoother overall, TSF shell uses 26.5MB by itself, twice as much as Go, but it shows up running as a system/permenant process unlike Go Launcher, which runs as a priority six user app. In essence, Android would crash before the launcher would get killed.
 
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