Database Users

Available RAM info

Hey guys,
I was watching a demo of this phone from the French blog Frandroid and came across some useful info about the available amount of RAM:
We know the Galaxy S has 512MB of RAM, however, being the owner of an i8000 Omnia II (only 256MB), I can tell you that there are major issues with the very low available amount of RAM the phone actually had (the people over at Modaco were fighting like crazy to bring the amount up).
- Apparently, the phone has 180MB of available RAM (the rest seems to be used by Samsung/Android and not available for apps and all that).
- The phone has 79MB of available RAM with the following apps running:
+ Email
+ Clock
+ Amazon MP3
+ Voice Recognition (from Google)
+ Browser (however I don't know if it's Web or not)
+ Social Hub
+ Video Player
+ MP3 Player
+ "Advance Task Killer Free"
I hope this helps.
Cheers,
Will

Will.1 said:
The phone has 79MB of available RAM with the following apps running
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That looks pretty good to me. (I can't see what other apps i would be using with all of those running. To use GPS or read ebooks or write documents, etc I would close half of them)
Does anyone know if froyo uses more resources than eclair?
PS. I assume you mean those apps were all running simultaneously, and there was still 79MB free?
PPS. This will be my first android phone, so I hope 79MB free is pretty good. For some reason I seem to think that your post is criticizing these results, but I could be mis-reading. It is so late...

Because they are using the prototype version.
As gsmarena have stated the prototype version does only have 256 Mb while the final version will have 512 Mb

Dark Sector said:
Because they are using the prototype version.
As gsmarena have stated the prototype version does only have 256 Mb while the final version will have 512 Mb
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No, the prototype had 512 meg of ram, just the software wasn't reporting it correctly

There are two things to consider here: first, with 2.1, the system can't use all of the available RAM. That will have to wait until Froyo arrives. Second, Android isn't Windows! Its Multitasking is very advanced and specifically designed for mobile devices. Even if you think all these applications are currently running, and the device does its magic to let it appear so, they don't always eat their share of RAM.
Free RAM says nothing at all on Android. Even apps that aren't currently "running" are kept in Memory when they are likely to be started again soon. What use is a large sum of unused memory? If you really need it, it will be there - at other times be glad it is put to use!

That might be true but as an i8000 owner I strongly advice everybody who want to buy that phone to what still somebody realiable got the phone and can report about the total amount of ram that is aviable to the system (OS + apps).
The I8000 only has about of 139 - 156 mb ram aviable to the system besides being sold as a 256 mb device.

TheGoD said:
That might be true but as an i8000 owner I strongly advice everybody who want to buy that phone to what still somebody realiable got the phone and can report about the total amount of ram that is aviable to the system (OS + apps).
The I8000 only has about of 139 - 156 mb ram aviable to the system besides being sold as a 256 mb device.
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I think this is why the I800 was fast because "maybe" samsung came up with away to use some of the RAM space to speed up the device .
It might happen again specially while the Galaxy S looks so fast
For now let's say that Galaxy S will have 412 MB of available RAM .. still this looks too much

goood..

Can someone confirm the amount of RAM available?? (Only takes a few seconds)

Can someone confirm the amount of RAM that is available to the user? There were rumors that only 512mb was available (leaving the other 512 for the laptop dock). However, I've also heard that around 800mb was available to the user (meaning the full gig, essentially). To easily see this, download Android System Info from the market, open it, and on the first page/tab you can see RAM (total available, etc.)....
Thanks in advance!

I, too, would like to know the answer to this. It would be pretty weak of Motorola if it only allowed 512 of it to be used.

+1.
I would like to know this as well.

Bump

It says 425M available + 172 if I'm not mistaken.

From android system info there is 818MB RAM available, but after killing all threads the free RAM is no more than 510MB

motoblur/android cant be gobbling up 512mb worth of RAM. perhaps some is allocated to webtop? i would be very dissapointed if that were the case.

Thanks guys

Mine says 818MB with 432 available.
Sent from my MB860 using XDA App

Bit advanced task killer only shows 394 + 111
Sent from my MB860 using XDA App

Mine says..
Max: 818MB
Free: 280MB

Maybe it allocates 512mb for webtop and when the other 512mb (or whatever size after format) runs out it starts using the 512mb from the webtop

Jesus i hope that's not true, there has to be a way to disable that.

Hey guys, those of you with the device, go into the "tasks" tab of Android System Info.....here you should be able to see EVERYTHING that is consuming memory.....in a task killer, you likely won't be able to kill everything (and you shouldn't). For example, on my inspire, there are a lot of core processes and things that wouldnt show up in a task killer (like phone, etc.). A close look in this tab should give us a clearer picture. It does, however, appear that the full gig (essentially) is available. My inspire's ram is 768 and my max ram is 623, so the atrix seems somewhat comparable in the proportion of available ram.

Ram question

just a quick question. after reading about the specs the iconia a500 should have 1gb of ram. in application settings it looks like it adds up to 512mb? is this correct?

This is not correct. Go to Settings> About Tablet>Device Information and scroll down to RAM size.

okay thanks. I'm actually at staples now and. Checked the xoom and the iconia displays and they have the same issue

I believe the 1 GB advertisement (on Xoom and actually all other Honeycomb models), is 512 MB of onboard ram, and 512 MB for the video card.
Thus adding to 1 GB.
I believe this is a "standard" (yeah, frustrating, but true). All Honeycomb tablets advertising 1 GB of ram actually mean 512 MB onboard, and 512 MB on video.

thank you so much for clearing that up!

I believe it is 1gb of system ram (possibly shared on demand with the video hardware)... Using Advanced Task Killer when I clear the running tasks I see 445MB free. There is no way the system is running on just 55MB. I'm guessing Honeycomb just uses a lot of ram in background system processes.
The running applications on mine are using 149MB with 455MB free right now but I don't think that number accounts for all of the background services. Anyway it's not a dedicated 512/512 ram split.

ASUS TF300 the first Android device to TRULY have 1GB of RAM?

I posted this in another thread but thought it was worthy of its own thread.
I've owned a lot of Android devices with 1GB of RAM - Xoom, Galaxy Tab 10.1, Galaxy Note, and the original Transformer. This is the first android device that actually shows 1gb of ram. Every 1gb phone or tablet I've had only lists around 750mb total, and then only about 400 or so free on a fresh boot. The explanation has always been that 1gb is shared ram and that the mixing 250mb or so is for video ram. You can see total and available ram in an app called OSMonitor. Anyway, the tf300 actually shows 1gb total ram, and 750 free on a fresh boot. So that's an extra 250mb of usable ram over other devices.
Thoughts?

The device has more as 1GB RAM (1,2GB maybe)?
Gesendet von meinem Galaxy Nexus mit Tapatalk 2

It's advertised as 1GB of RAM, so either it has more actual RAM (1.2 like you suggest) or it has dedicated video RAM somehow.
It's very possible this is inherent to Tegra3. I do not have any Tegra 3 devices to check. I'm going to ask in the Prime Q&A section.

Obviously either a design flaw or outright false advertisement. You should sue them for giving you more ram than advertised.

goodintentions said:
Obviously either a design flaw or outright false advertisement. You should sue them for giving you more ram than advertised.
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WTF? I'm not complaining I'm trying to understand it. It's different than every other Android device.

EvoXOhio said:
WTF? I'm not complaining I'm trying to understand it. It's different than every other Android device.
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Goodintentions is known to be sarcastic you will learn that in time. Most likley it is because tegra 3's gpu has its own dedicated ram so it does not go into the system ram

mrevankyle said:
Goodintentions is known to be sarcastic you will learn that in time. Most likley it is because tegra 3's gpu has its own dedicated ram so it does not go into the system ram
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That would explain it. do you have a source link to back that up? not finding anything in a google search.
Thanks.

Everything im finding is that it just has the 1gb of ram, but possibly the way it handles it is different and may expand or shrink that video ram depending on what it needs.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/tegra-3-processor.html
just general info

also is DDR3

jblah said:
also is DDR3
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Yeah DDR3 means it's faster and has more bandwidth, but that wouldn't affect whether the system has dedicated or shared video RAM.

Is it possible that it's just more efficient in the usage of it's 1GB of ram than the previous products? I can't find any mention anywhere of Tegra 3 specifically doing anything or of the TF300 having more secret ram or anything.

That was the first thing that I noticed about this tab, is that the memory management on this tab is awesome. I can be running GTA3, have two or three tabs open in the browser and also be streaming music and the RAM only drops to about 550MB. At idle on a fresh boot, around 750MB free at idle, and If i do a task killer it will jump up to 830MB temporarily. I can only think it's becuase of the Tegra3 CPU. Regardless it's nice to see a tab with so much free RAM.

Scavar said:
Is it possible that it's just more efficient in the usage of it's 1GB of ram than the previous products? I can't find any mention anywhere of Tegra 3 specifically doing anything or of the TF300 having more secret ram or anything.
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No because we're not talking about FREE RAM here we're taking about TOTAL RAM. either the system has more than 1GB or it's not sharing RAM with the video card.

das7771 said:
At idle on a fresh boot, around 750MB free at idle, and If i do a task killer it will jump up to 830MB temporarily. I can only think it's becuase of the Tegra3 CPU. Regardless it's nice to see a tab with so much free RAM.
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Huge amounts of free RAM is not something nice to see; it's a pointless waste. I guess that misunderstanding is still pervasive in the "OMG tasks are in RAM MUST KILL THEM" community ...

nightwulf said:
Huge amounts of free RAM is not something nice to see; it's a pointless waste. I guess that misunderstanding is still pervasive in the "OMG tasks are in RAM MUST KILL THEM" community ...
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Huge amounts of free RAM on a fresh boot is a GREAT thing. It means that the OS is lightweight and not loading tons of bloatware into memory. Now after using the tablet and opening tons of apps the free RAM should go down, if not then yes it is wasting RAM by dumping stuff out of memory.
But besides that the topic at hand is total RAM. more total RAM means more apps can stay in the background which means better multitasking.

They all actually have 1GB of RAM. The difference is simply that some chips separate the video RAM and the system RAM, where others are able to use a shared memory space and dynamically allocate RAM to video as necessary.
Most likely, devices with higher memory bandwidth will be able to use dynamically allocation because the extra bandwidth provides the overhead necessary to minimize performance impacts should the GPU need to pull more memory from the system on the fly.
On Tegra2 devices which were limited to 1 channel of 32bit ddr2, there is much less memory bandwidth than on tegra3 with ddr3 (or dual channel ddr2 like ipad). In this instance, it would cause a performance hit to have to free up extra memory from background tasks and then reallocate it to the gpu - so the solution is to just partition the entire memory into two sections each of which are generally large enough for both their respective duties: video ram and system ram.

EvoXOhio said:
Yeah DDR3 means it's faster and has more bandwidth, but that wouldn't affect whether the system has dedicated or shared video RAM.
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current reviews & memory benchmarks have shown the 300 ddr3 ram shows no Performance improvement over Prime ddr2. developers here can probably make the most it though.
Finally you all have your own section. CONGRATS!
---------- Post added at 10:33 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:25 AM ----------
a.mcdear said:
They all actually have 1GB of RAM. The difference is simply that some chips separate the video RAM and the system RAM, where others are able to use a shared memory space and dynamically allocate RAM to video as necessary.
Most likely, devices with higher memory bandwidth will be able to use dynamically allocation because the extra bandwidth provides the overhead necessary to minimize performance impacts should the GPU need to pull more memory from the system on the fly.
On Tegra2 devices which were limited to 1 channel of 32bit ddr2, there is much less memory bandwidth than on tegra3 with ddr3 (or dual channel ddr2 like ipad). In this instance, it would cause a performance hit to have to free up extra memory from background tasks and then reallocate it to the gpu - so the solution is to just partition the entire memory into two sections each of which are generally large enough for both their respective duties: video ram and system ram.
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Click to collapse
he makes a great point. although no memory improvements shown in benchmarking, what he is saying could be seen as an improvement though. good info.
300 is not the only Tegra3 kid on the block with new DDR3 ram. Toshiba just released their Tegra3 Excite 10.1 in. tablet. it has gorilla glass, 1280x800 display, and 1gb DDR3 ram. available in 16 or 32gb. you can also order a 64gb.

demandarin said:
current reviews & memory benchmarks have shown the 300 ddr3 ram shows no Performance improvement over Prime ddr2. developers here can probably make the most it though.
Finally you all have your own section. CONGRATS!
---------- Post added at 10:33 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:25 AM ----------
he makes a great point. although no memory improvements shown in benchmarking, what he is saying could be seen as an improvement though. good info.
300 is not the only Tegra3 kid on the block with new DDR3 ram. Toshiba just released their Tegra3 Excite 10.1 in. tablet. it has gorilla glass, 1280x800 display, and 1gb DDR3 ram. available in 16 or 32gb. you can also order a 64gb.
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500 bucks for a 32gig.... No sir.
Sent from my SPH-D710 using xda premium

In the spec section Amazon lists the TF300 as having 2GB of RAM...I'm sure its a mistype though.
http://www.amazon.com/Transformer-TF300-T-B1-BL-10-1-Inch-Tablet/dp/B007P4YAPK

Running 2.6 Kernel mine shows 983,2 MB of Total RAM.
After installing some nec. apps it drops down from ~850 MB to ~630 of
available RAM. After removal of most BW it shows ~820 MB of free RAM.
It's normal behaviour. It just acts like the Prime. Open it und you'll see a Prime with some faster MemoryChips & an optimized board design
I just hated my Prime for many reasons, but I really love this one
They've improved very much here

What's your maximum available ram and how to increase it?

I'm only getting 1.58 GB and after the reboot my ram usage is like 1.31/1.58. I know it's 2GB device. So the question is why only 1.58gb can be used and how to increase it to 2.0gb? Anyone?

Cause probably the rest of the ram is used by core (not Android os) and hardware

Mine is 1.82 GB. Which is normal due to the conversion discrepancy between MB/GB.

1.82 or 1.72. Can't remember and don't want to look right now
The only way to increase it is by using swap. Either with an app like the rhoesoft ram expander (I think thats how it's wrote), or with a rom feature. But the ram you get with swap is not as fast as real ram. It will also degrade the life of the storage in that it is being stored. You can google more info about swap.
Are you sure you're reading it right? I usually have 1.2 GB ram free.
If you have 1.31 from 1.58 free then maybe you should consider uninstalling some apps. Cuz that's an unusual lot of ram usage

osvanberg said:
Mine is 1.82 GB. Which is normal due to the conversion discrepancy between MB/GB.
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2000/1024 isn't 1.82. And I don't know why mine shows 1.5. That's a 300 missing. I'm on 4.4 tw.

It's just like HDD's. You buy one with 500 GB storage and when you set it up it shows only 480 GB or so.
And yes, samsung kinda ripped us off. 9 GB of internal storage is not 16! and 1.82 GB ram is not 2 GB! It's basically false advertisement what they are doing..