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Hello,
I was reading a lot of posts about adding a swap partition in the SD card for android devices.
There seems to be no support for it in the stock kernel of the HTC Sensation, and there isnt any rom that supports it.
Is it very difficult to recompile a kernel (for example I'm using LEEdroid 1.3)
Do you guys think that it will be worth the hassle?
I have a Class 10 Sd card, and coming from a Nokia N900 swapping on it wasnt that slow, but In what Im more interested is in keeping more things in memory to avoid doing reloads (for example when you open 3 tabs in the web browser and go to google talk or play something like drag racing and then you reopen the web browser all the tabs must be reloaded, from what I understand to avoid running out of memory).
Sorry for my english, sorry for asking this in this forum, but I'm a new member and I'm not allowed to Post in the android development forums, but any help would be really appreciated.
Again Sorry for my english,
And Saludos desde españa!
i was thinking the same way but it seems that no one is interested in swap support
There comes a point when swap just wouldn't be as useful. It was needed on the G1 because it barely had enough Ram to hold a home screen in memory, so there was no other alternative BUT to use swap to make your phone functional, but on a phone like this it would noticeably slow it down since your sdcard would be slower than internal Ram. The reason it would be slower is because the phone doesn't actually run the apps from swap, it just stores them there, so every time you would want to run an app that was stored in swap, your phone would have to move one app from internal ram to swap, then move the app you want to use back to internal. Even with a class 10 sdcard, that would be slower than your dual-core phone opening the app from scratch I'd think...
Hopefully this helps, and hopefully I explained it right. Been so long since I used swap, I really had to think to remember.
So i'm getting pretty unhappy with my Charge, the screen is wonderful, but the battery life, call quality (hissing and popping), and data connection reliability are really pretty hard to bear.
And i think its all Samsung's poor software support to blame.
However, I really dont know if i want to keep this phone or move to another, and one of the deciding factors is the RAM. The phone supposedly has 512MB, but when i goto task manager, i always see that there is 291(ish) of 373 free MB. I know that free memory doesnt really matter due to the way that Android manages things, but on the other hand, in real world experience i get re-draws all the time on launcher telling me that the O/S killed the launcher due to low memory!
Ive tried all kinds of ROMS and stock btw, and this is an obvservation that was consistent on Gummy 2.0, Gummy FE 2.0, InfinityRom Beta (10/13), EP4 leak, and now on Humble 5.0rc2
This is when im not running any apps at all. I understand that the O/S and launcher will take up some, and 291 seems fine im sure some of that is cached etc. But why is 373 the maximum that could be free? If the O/S and launcher are in that 291, what is occupying memory from 374-512???
is 512 enough to run on for the next year? We dont really know how much ICS will take.
512MB is the total RAM onboard, but a portion of that system reserved, thus 373MB available. GB is better than Froyo...it had 327MB available.
I highly suggest using the v6 supercharger script. After running the script select option 7. I never get redraws and don't use a task killer. Android keeps me at atleast 90 MB of free ram all the time. I also ran the loopy smoothness script and added my most used apps to the script so they stay in cache all the time. It is now faster than my evo ever thought about on cm7 and it had over 190 MB of free ram
Can someone explain the overlap between Fugu Tweaks, LoopySmooth, and supercharger? Does it help to patch all 3?
cmdrfrog said:
Can someone explain the overlap between Fugu Tweaks, LoopySmooth, and supercharger? Does it help to patch all 3?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Fugu replaces a couple of the lower level processes with a version from a newer version of Android. The current version of Fugu uses binaries from Ice Cream Sandwich. They're reported to increase overal responsiveness. I had decent luck with earlier releases, but I haven't tried the latest.
Loopy Smoothness elevates the priority of the launcher while it's in the foreground so that, in theory, it is more responsive. In practice, the results are mixed and it depends a lot on your individual setup. It requires some extra setup on the user's part as well to make sure that your launcher is being watched.
V6 Supercharger is an overhaul to the memory management system. Specifically, it modifies the way the built out of memory task killer system works. It's not a task killer on it's own, and it doesn't subvert the Android way, but it tweaks some things and modifies the points at which the OS kills processes to free memory. It also raises the OOM priority of the launcher so that it becomes a last-resort kill (to prevent redraws). This one is really, really mixed and really depends on a lot of factors. You can make things run really well with this, or you can make thing run really badly with it. It pays to do some research and understand exactly what it's doing to the system if you intend to run it. It is generally unecessary, especially on the GB builds, but with some tweaking, you can get some good out of it.
I Just fonder where ROM's are installed to?
Is it installed to RAM or Phones own space...
Just help a noob. That's me when we are speaking about phones?
If it is installed to RAM, if i delete system files, can i free up RAM.
Any other ways to free up RAM? i already used ROM-Cleaner...
TheLnxDrd said:
I Just fonder where ROM's are installed to?
Is it installed to RAM or Phones own space...
Just help a noob. That's me when we are speaking about phones?
If it is installed to RAM, if i delete system files, can i free up RAM.
Any other ways to free up RAM? i already used ROM-Cleaner...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The rom is installed in phone memory, and deleting system files will not free up ram.
If you are having trouble with ram, try installing a swap partition in your phone memory...what that does is uses part of your phone memory as ram (you will be unable to use it for storage then)
Search for swap on the Sensation android development forum, you will find atleast a couple...read the post well before installing.
TheLnxDrd said:
I Just fonder where ROM's are installed to?
Is it installed to RAM or Phones own space...
Just help a noob. That's me when we are speaking about phones?
If it is installed to RAM, if i delete system files, can i free up RAM.
Any other ways to free up RAM? i already used ROM-Cleaner...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
There are a few basic terms you need to understand:
RAM- Random Access Memory - Where data used by the processor is stored (like variables of calculations), and that means - what your app uses while running.
ROM - Read Only Memory - And in our context - the OS.
The ROM and RAM are different memories, by that RAM is deleted when the computer (in this case - the phone) is shut down, while the ROM (and other data stored on the flash memory) is kept.
You can use the ROM to have more RAM, by making a SWAP space.
And for general knowledge - there are a couple of partitions on our phone. What interests us is (mainly) these three:
/data - That's the storage available to us - where we install apps etc.
/system - where system apps and the ROM itself is
/boot - the kernel - what makes the whole OS tick.
Basically, unless on very limited resources, android will handle RAM without you even knowing it. However, when the phone runs with heavy apps all the time, it could get full easily. There are task killers, and also, a reboot can clean your RAM (there could be "memory leaks", however, I do not know of it being an issue on android), and allow it to start fresh.
There are also RAM tweaks such as ZRAM etc. And also, some kernels offer even more optimization.
This may be a general question for all android devices or not but I was curious about adding swap space to this device. It has 1 gig of ram and many may consider that to be enough, and it might be. I have cyanogenmod 10.2 installed and tried to enable zram, 10% seems to be the best setting as anthing higher caused a game to pop up a notice saying something about low memory and defaulting to lower values. When I checked to see if zram was used however it turns out it was, about 25mb - 34mb after booting. The issue with zram is when multitasking with lecturenotes and moonreader, The tablet would reboot and my notebook that was open in lecturenotes would be missing notes I took or the settings would be greatly messed up, or both. This was with 10%.
I am thinking since it was used, it might be helpful to have an sd card for this reason, to aid in multitasking. This is important to me because I run several apps at once (I wish cyanogenmod had multi windows, and google wouldn't threaten over it). So the question is will there be a benifit to buying an sd card on ebay (class 10 of course) and using it as swap space. It seems this tablet might be on the cusp of the memory being enough. Also I am thinking this might help to future proof it a bit when updating to newer releases of gyanogenmod. The sd card I was thinking of is 4 gigs and may plan on having 1gb swap space (this tablet is for school and other work). The tablet has 32gb storage and that is more than enough for me (I am only using 3gb of space) so I wont need to add anymore storage.
I should also add that when multitasking without zram enabled, the tablet reboots less but still has done it, and so far nothing has been lost in my notebooks. I am thinking that the memory of 1gb is starting to reach its limit, with no apps running I am consuming about 600mbs of it.
vanquishedangel said:
This may be a general question for all android devices or not but I was curious about adding swap space to this device. It has 1 gig of ram and many may consider that to be enough, and it might be. I have cyanogenmod 10.2 installed and tried to enable zram, 10% seems to be the best setting as anthing higher caused a game to pop up a notice saying something about low memory and defaulting to lower values. When I checked to see if zram was used however it turns out it was, about 25mb - 34mb after booting. The issue with zram is when multitasking with lecturenotes and moonreader, The tablet would reboot and my notebook that was open in lecturenotes would be missing notes I took or the settings would be greatly messed up, or both. This was with 10%.
I am thinking since it was used, it might be helpful to have an sd card for this reason, to aid in multitasking. This is important to me because I run several apps at once (I wish cyanogenmod had multi windows, and google wouldn't threaten over it). So the question is will there be a benifit to buying an sd card on ebay (class 10 of course) and using it as swap space. It seems this tablet might be on the cusp of the memory being enough. Also I am thinking this might help to future proof it a bit when updating to newer releases of gyanogenmod. The sd card I was thinking of is 4 gigs and may plan on having 1gb swap space (this tablet is for school and other work). The tablet has 32gb storage and that is more than enough for me (I am only using 3gb of space) so I wont need to add anymore storage.
I should also add that when multitasking without zram enabled, the tablet reboots less but still has done it, and so far nothing has been lost in my notebooks. I am thinking that the memory of 1gb is starting to reach its limit, with no apps running I am consuming about 600mbs of it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well in my own personal testing i could not see any benefit while extracting 700mb archives under android with 4gb swap space on a 40mbs microsd card, while under full linux desktop with a same workload, swap differently helps keep the system smooth under heavy io load. The conclusion i drew was the android platform deals to memory management differently than the typical desktop os, due to slower emmc chips used as a boot disk for the majority of android devices using this slow, already bottlenecked memory as swap space doesn't make sense (not to mention the use of 2gb swap space on a limited 16gb storage etc), so android runs almost completely in ram, with stricter memory management and allocation allows android to run fine without swap space, although because of this, androids memory management makes little uses of available swap space
JoinTheRealms said:
Well in my own personal testing i could not see any benefit while extracting 700mb archives under android with 4gb swap space on a 40mbs microsd card, while under full linux desktop with a same workload, swap differently helps keep the system smooth under heavy io load.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I've been running my desktop without swap for the last 10 years, and as long as you have enough RAM for all your running programs, there will be no problem at all.
Extracting an archive is a mostly sequential operation (single read stream, single write stream), so it also doesn't benefit from caching, which could use the memory that is freed by swapping.
_that said:
I've been running my desktop without swap for the last 10 years, and as long as you have enough RAM for all your running programs, there will be no problem at all.
Extracting an archive is a mostly sequential operation (single read stream, single write stream), so it also doesn't benefit from caching, which could use the memory that is freed by swapping.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ahh that makes sense. I wasnt sure if swap had an effect directly on the extraction, but seem keeped the rest system more stable/ smooth duing the process in the case of GNU/Linux, with swap off similar operations such as installing packages would more oftern lock the tablet up. Might be a placebo though
I also dont set swap on my Linux desktop, as it has plenty of ram but the benitfit of swap space is somewhat more noticable due to the lack of ram on the tf700.
JoinTheRealms said:
I also dont set swap on my Linux desktop, as it has plenty of ram but the benitfit of swap space is somewhat more noticable due to the lack of ram on the tf700.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I just want to share my user experiences on the swap space... It does seem to improve the tf700 with swap space due to the lack of RAM (1GB)..
Thanks for all the useful posts
Thanks for all the posts, I have my sd card on the way. I will post my experience when I get my sd card but I am sure it is safe to say there will be a benefit. I use linux to at home and have 8 gigs of ram on that computer, I lessen the swap after install to about 512mb because 8 gigs is more then enough. I leave some however just incase of any issues like ram going bad. On another computer in the house that has limited ram (1.5 gigs) I have enabled zram (384 mb) and added two old flash cards (1 gig each) to a pci raid card and those were converted to swap. I then altered the fstab to reflect the order of priority I wanted them used in. The reason is that when the swap is used from the hard drive, and the hard drive is being written to, can cause a slow down. So with the 2 flash cards at 1 gig each (the swap seen as 2 gigs) it seemed to speed it up. I just posted that because of the nix users and it seemed like a good plan to run it that way.
Ok, got the sd card
So I recieved the sd card today and applied the swap space to it using root swapper (max setting is 256mb, I figured i can find a way to increase it later if I need to). The defaut location in many of the swap applications will not work on this device however, the sd card mounts at /storage/sdcard1 in my case. So it has to be entered manually (might just be cyanogenmod). Also the device was picky when insalling the card, it would only say blank sd card or cannot read filesystem. I had to install the card in the dock, format it from cwm recovery, (vfat if I remember correct, ext2 and ntfs had issues, avoided ext3 and ext4 cause journaling will cause more wear and tear).
The sd card is a scandisk ultra sdhc uhs-1 8 gigs. From my research that is the fastest this tab can handle. I also use optimising programs like greenify (epic save everything app), pimp my rom (almost every tweak applied), and some pretty efficient tweaks in the settings as well. I also have HALO))) installed and working (epic multiwindow app that works with native programs and almost any rom).
The resuts:
I tested it many ways, I rebooted to see use (none was used because swap starts after boot), I opened apps normally (browsers and things), and it showed 9kb's was used. I then put it to the tests, I open four windows in halo, these were youtube, moonreader pro with a pdf ebook, lecturenotes (awsome note and handwriting app with tons of functions), and Supernote pro (not the best note app). Constantly switched between the apps and messed with settings with them open. The max of swap used was around 10mb(keeping in mind that when I switch windows the app(s) I leave get paused making it hard to tell actual usage because I had to swith the terminal and type "free". I then ran antutu bechmark and gpubench (my tab stills score pretty well) and got a little higher swap usage but not much.
As for the feel of it, it seemed to help when opening many windows in halo, this is the primary reason for my doing this. As for other more normal uses I really didnt see too much of a difference, I did test games however and they did seem a little better (could be placebo) but I am not really sure why they would except android cached other apps to free memory. Reopening apps seemed faster. Also because of apps like greenify my memory usage is decreased so I am sure typically swap would have seen more use.
The conclusion is that at this point I really didn't notice much of a boost for any normal use, but I will definately keep the swap space on due to the boost when using halo and not to mention that I will be updating to android 4.4 soon and it might need more memory. Swap at this point seems more like a pre emptive strike, but it does help with multitasking.
about swap
://androidforums.com/boost-mobile-warp-all-things-root/610449-ram-swapping-without-swapper2.html I actually followed a guide on android central and redid the swap file to 1 gig to swap instead of using a program, this worked better. (add http in front), when i disabled swap it was noticeable that there was a boost. then reenabled it this method.
Respected Experts and Moderators,
Apologies if I posted my question in a wrong forum.
I have a mobile running Android 4.2.1 and I GB RAM. I landed into a typical problem of 'Space Running Out'. My App Manager shows that I have roughly 50 MB free memory.
I tried various methods like Cache Cleaner, ES File Explorer (to clean log files etc). However, the problem would return back. Than I learned about applications like Roehsoft's RAM Expander that can create a swap file to increase the RAM. My phone is compatible with the app as the result of test done their 'MemoryInfo-SwapCheck' app shows. Since, this is a paid app, I wondering how does it hooks into the Android System so that the:
# Android is aware of the swap file
# Android is able to use the swap file as an extension of its RAM
# Any effect on performance since I/O from internal RAM would much much faster than from a memory card
Thanks.
PS: I am a software engineer but my field of expertise is web applications.
manu_12 said:
Respected Experts and Moderators,
Apologies if I posted my question in a wrong forum.
I have a mobile running Android 4.2.1 and I GB RAM. I landed into a typical problem of 'Space Running Out'. My App Manager shows that I have roughly 50 MB free memory.
I tried various methods like Cache Cleaner, ES File Explorer (to clean log files etc). However, the problem would return back. Than I learned about applications like Roehsoft's RAM Expander that can create a swap file to increase the RAM. My phone is compatible with the app as the result of test done their 'MemoryInfo-SwapCheck' app shows. Since, this is a paid app, I wondering how does it hooks into the Android System so that the:
# Android is aware of the swap file
# Android is able to use the swap file as an extension of its RAM
# Any effect on performance since I/O from internal RAM would much much faster than from a memory card
Thanks.
PS: I am a software engineer but my field of expertise is web applications.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The warning you're getting is not related to low RAM but rather low on internal memory (internal sd card) because Android will never warn you about low ram ( it has a low memory killer that kills running apps in background when low on RAM).
So what you should be doing instead is increasing internal memory, follow this guide http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2142844 , if you don't want to use a pc for partitioning your sd card use this app instead https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sylkat.AParted
If you insist on increasing your Ram with swap files take look at this guide http://www.google.dz/url?q=http://f...ggNMAA&usg=AFQjCNHUQFy9IB9qBypg2moBrjPZ2FYVjw
Good luck
Don't just say Thanks, press the ? button.
Thanks @a. felon. This solution has helped. Going through various blogs gave me the impression that RAM Expander solution and link2sd card solution are alternatives to resolve the same problem.