[ale] OT: Android RAM

[Scott Plante]

" Too many wars have been fought over misunderstanding of RAM usage... " 


I'm pretty sure that is why Gavrilo Princip was so upset with the Archduke Ferdinand. At least, that's what I heard. 
;-) 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Allan Davis" <cajun.code at gmail.com> 
To: "Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts" <ale at ale.org> 
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 12:16:14 PM 
Subject: Re: [ale] OT: Android RAM 


Inactive most likely refers to ram which has recently been used by an application (but no longer needed), and is still being tracked. It is basically free ram, and will get freed up as it is needed, but the benefits of doing it this way, is that Applications can be restarted quicker sometimes (think of it maybe as a cache). It's cheap for the OS to free the memory, so prematurely releasing it does very little except give the shiny satisfaction that your free memory is better. Inactive RAM may also contain cache (but not sure what exactly it's referring to). 

RAM is poorly understood on computers too actually. There was a report recently which claimed that windows 7 was using up all available ram and there was swapping. What the guy at the company didn't understand was that a lot of it was cache which was freed as needed. 

More info is at: http://reviews.cnet....006694-263.html 

In a nutshell though, free RAM is wasted ram. The important statistic is active RAM/Total RAM available.. Too many wars have been fought over misunderstanding of RAM usage...