Memory bloated?
 

It happened today that during my various tests,
I had to fire up good old top; and I noticed my 1GB RAM being fully used!
Now this is totally a newbie question and I apologize for that.
Is this normal on harmattan?

It seems all the device slowdowns occour exactly once the memory is full.
EDIT : which is compatible with swapping happening.

Re: Memory bloated?
 

http://everythingn9.com/ has an article on swap etc in one of their most recent posts....

Re: Memory bloated?
 

This is ********. Quitting app will free the RAM.
Cache is essentially free memory.

Re: Memory bloated?
 

Okay;
a bit of investigation turned up that everything is ok.
Maybe the fact that I did not reboot my phone in like two weeks contribuited to the bloating :P.
So, on boot up (at the first moment a SSH connection via SDK mode is available) the ammount of used RAM is about 720 Megs (according to top).

After boot is complete, applications are then pre-started as configured by each application (and as expected; so nothing strange here).
Opening many apps turned out to push the mem to 1 GB; but no problems (except the usual slow downs). So nothing weird here :).

Perhaps using inception it could be easy to force a non-prestarted mode for most of the apps, which would save ram, and maybe also power?

Re: Memory bloated?
 

Linux always uses up all available memory for buffers/cache, nothing strange there. Unused memory is wasted memory.

Re: Memory bloated?
 

Sure that.
But also wasted battery.

Re: Memory bloated?
 

Really? Care to explain how?

You think that unused memory will not use electricity?

Re: Memory bloated?
 

DRAM requires periodic refresh to retain values.
I would assume in low power envs unused DRAM would smartly be kept off (thus avoiding unnecessary currency drain).


But then again, I have no idea how DRAM in low power works so I am most likely wrong (even tho my thought sounds quite logical to me) :).

EDIT: no mentioning of dropping currency drain from unused ram it seems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_DDR

Re: Memory bloated?
 

Of course not - switching them on and off would drain more power, not to mention the lag caused of having to switch on banks of memory when you need them.

So, next time please inform yourself before spreading misinformation.

Re: Memory bloated?
 

Meaning how?

Re: Memory bloated?
 

Currently the software never tells the hardware about the status of the different portions of the memory, for this to work they'd have to add circuitry and kernel support for all this, which consumes power.
These modules are already super efficient, and extra components doing switching banks on/off all the time would diminish much of the power you gain by having them off.

Finally, the RAM is one of the least concerns in terms of battery life, it consumes so little compared to other components like the display and the various radios.