Originally Posted by albundy2010

Your phone is supposed to use ram that it has available. So is your computer. Free ram = wasted ram.

No its not wasted. By your logic I should use 100% of my ram... that's nuts.

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No its not nuts. The phone has a minimum free limit for ram. Use up the ram till that point. Not 100 percent.

Windows also does something similar with its caching into ram system.

The only thing that is nuts is people still not realizing that free ram is wasted ram in 2012.

Pretty much correct. Free RAM is wasted RAM. Use the "free" command on your phone or a linux box (or even check out task manager -> performance tab in windows) and see how much RAM is actually not being used.

My phone is showing about 7mb free, which is correct. Other places tell you how much it is ready to clear, such as android telling me i have 200mb free ram in apps -> running, while really it is using ~200mb for cached apps which it is happy to let go of if something comes up requiring RAM, otherwise it keeps it there to be quicker when these cached apps are opened. This doesn't use more battery or slow it down, but when cached app free ram is low things get sluggish for reasons which are probably quite clear.

Originally Posted by albundy2010

No its not nuts. The phone has a minimum free limit for ram. Use up the ram till that point. Not 100 percent.

Windows also does something similar with its caching into ram system.

The only thing that is nuts is people still not realizing that free ram is wasted ram in 2012.

Then why is it when more ram is used the slower the PC or phone is. Once again I have 8gb laptop ram and its faster with that then 2 or 4gb ram DDR 3 type. My phone gets to 80mb free its slow on 120mb free its faster.

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First you need to clarify the meaning of two things.

1. available RAM
More RAM you have, (in most cases, not always) the faster the system will be. This explains why system with 4 GB RAM is faster than the one with 2GB.

And this is something completely different than:

2. free ram
Free RAM means that the system is not using this RAM. That means if you have 4GB of RAM and there is 2GB of free RAM, it is (almost) the same as the system would have only 2GB. That is why it is essential that a good operating system is using as much RAM as it can.

Especially on Android it does not make any sense to have a high number in minfree settings for free RAM. Even if you start a new app, it would not be started much faster, because Android system still need to free the RAM from unused apps to keep the amount of free RAM high.

Originally Posted by podtalje

First you need to clarify the meaning of two things.

1. available RAM
More RAM you have, (in most cases, not always) the faster the system will be. This explains why system with 4 GB RAM is faster than the one with 2GB.

And this is something completely different than:

2. free ram
Free RAM means that the system is not using this RAM. That means if you have 4GB of RAM and there is 2GB of free RAM, it is (almost) the same as the system would have only 2GB. That is why it is essential that a good operating system is using as much RAM as it can.

Especially on Android it does not make any sense to have a high number in minfree settings for free RAM. Even if you start a new app, it would not be started much faster, because Android system still need to free the RAM from unused apps to keep the amount of free RAM high.

ok then what about my system... it has a quad core a6 apu (cpu gpu in one) by amd and 8gb of ddr3 ram. I would still like more if i could but it max out at 8gb for now. As the more i can add the more programs i can run at once. So am i silly for having 8gb?

and you are right free ram is what the system is not Currently using. and by having that free ram it helps when you want to open other programs like ms word or power point... which by the way use a ton of ram.

Originally Posted by Google_Nexus

ok then what about my system... it has a quad core a6 apu (cpu gpu in one) by amd and 8gb of ddr3 ram. I would still like more if i could but it max out at 8gb for now. As the more i can add the more programs i can run at once. So am i silly for having 8gb?

and you are right free ram is what the system is not Currently using. and by having that free ram it helps when you want to open other programs like ms word or power point... which by the way use a ton of ram.

Comparing your desktop to the phone is a bad analogy. The phone doesn't see labor intensive processes like encoding multi media, power point, java compilers etc. a normal internet mostly PC user would never touch 8 gigs nor need a 64 bit OS to enable over 4. Yes you can tax the desktop to use around what 6 and still have two unused, but the phone is very efficient at using what it has. Android is designed to manage it's own heap and you don't need to interact with that process. Killing apps to free this ram is counter acting what the phone is designed to do that is use 90 percent of your ram as efficient as using 10 percent while holding references to the last state each used app is in. If your phone isn't efficient enough for your taste perhaps the phone is in need of an upgrade lol not knocking you just when your understand how it works underneath you realize it's doing what it was designed to do.

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If it's not top dog then tell me why the Galaxy Nexus Sprint pre orders sold out in 3 days? Nexus lines are pretty much perfect for the nerds inside of us. They're not supposed to have the best specs, they're supposed to have the best optimization to make the phone feel like it has the best specs.

Silly for having 8gb of ram not quite. If you're not actually using the 8gb ever and thinking just having more ram is better/faster then yeah. That's silly.

I got 8 in my desktop. If I dropped it down till two I would never notice it ever doing daily stuff. Or anything at all that didn't require more than 2gb from the system. Even in single channel mode since it would only be one stick and you wouldn't notice.

Simply put. Free ram is wasted ram. It its just sitting there not doing anything then its doing just that. Not doing anything.

On another note if you did manage to use up all 8gb of ram on your system at any given the time your system would be bogged down by bottlnecks other than being out of ram for the most part. System would come to crawl due to the hdd/CPU I/O bottleneck first.

it is top notch. galaxy nexus is sold like crazy! nexus s is still going on too

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