Is 1gb of RAM still enough on Android?

[gmaster456]

I've been considering getting an Atrix HD and doing the Maxx battery mod and using the phone as a backup to my Nexus 4. The price is right and the battery life squashes what I get with my Nexus 4. The only thing I'm weary of is how the 1gb of RAM will do. I've had 2gb for the past 7 months now. I'm not a heavy multitasker but I don't like very much lag, slow responsiveness/scrolling or apps crashing. Something that I don't experience with my Nexus 4.

Anyone want to share their thoughts?

 

[ImDonly1]

First android phone I have is the S4 and the RAM use in constantly 800MB-1GB. Maybe that's just the S4 though?
I switched from the iPhone 4 and it was always short on RAM, websites would always have to reload if you have too many tabs.

 

[Yuriman]

First android phone I have is the S4 and the RAM use in constantly 800MB-1GB. Maybe that's just the S4 though?
I switched from the iPhone 4 and it was always short on RAM, websites would always have to reload if you have too many tabs.

^ Your S4 is prefetching a lot of programs. What's actually running probably isn't close to that, most of the time.

That said, I do push my GS2 (~800MB RAM) up to the limit occasionally, and have some of my background tasks closed. Generally this happens when I have maps running with turn-by-turn nav, music playing over bluetooth to my car, and my wife browsing with multiple tabs open. The typical result is my music will stop if she has a particularly large number of tabs open. I'm not sure if higher resolution devices would need more memory or not, so it may be that 1080p phones simply would not work with 1GB.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

First android phone I have is the S4 and the RAM use in constantly 800MB-1GB. Maybe that's just the S4 though?
I switched from the iPhone 4 and it was always short on RAM, websites would always have to reload if you have too many tabs.

Chrome always reloads tabs on my Nexus 4 even with 2gb of RAM. The iPhone works fine on 512mb of RAM, but Android needs twice that amount easily. It's two different OSes, so its hard to say the requirements translate directly across platforms.

Android tends to gobble as much RAM as you throw at it.

 

[gmaster456]

Chrome always reloads tabs on my Nexus 4 even with 2gb of RAM. The iPhone works fine on 512mb of RAM, but Android needs twice that amount easily. It's two different OSes, so its hard to say the requirements translate directly across platforms.

Android tends to gobble as much RAM as you throw at it.

I can have 8 tabs open with no reloading on my Nexus 4 easy. My iPad mini reloads if there's more than 3. Might have something to do with the sites.

 

[Ksyder]

What is this issue of reloading tabs? My being ignorant has led to the max limit of open windows on chrome on my nexus 4 and I just go and close them out.

 

[zerocool84]

1GB ram is mid tier now on Android. Not the best experience.

 

[podspi]

I personally don't think 1gb is enough these days. With only 1gb of RAM, I find that programs in the background will often close, or I'll get homescreen redraws, etc. I have the SGS3 now, and some people complain the US version is slower, but honestly I'd rather have the slower CPU with more RAM than a faster CPU and have to deal with swapping.

 

[ChronoReverse]

It's definitely noticeable having 2gb compared to 1gb. Still, 1gb isn't bad.

 

[Graze]

Unless we see a comparison where we can minimise the variables I guess we would not know exactly how much ram performance effects the phones.

Comparing two different generation phones with different memory architectures and completely shitty manufacturer roms is going to yield nothing scientific.

With that said I do believe that between 512mb and 1 gig you would see improvement on Android(not even doing ram intensive stuff like having 2 gillion apps running).

 

[zerogear]

Yes, but with caveat.

 

[tvdang7]

no my galaxy nexus and nexus 7 start to slow down real fast unless i manually close apps. 2gb is a must now unless of course if you have 0 apps installed and no widgets then you are fine.

 

[AznAnarchy99]

No. My Galaxy Nexus lags bad when I dont regularly close out all of my apps.

 

[SenK9]

I wouldn't consider using anything with less than 2GB nowadays. Android is usually pretty good with memory management, but having apps stay in background and not have to reload when multi-tasking is a luxury. Also keep in mind some devices like the N10 use part of the in-built memory for graphics (only 1.3GB of the 2GB is available).

 

[hans007]

i've got a razr M which has 1GB and a snapdragon s4.

had the galaxy nexus too. they both eventually would bog down when lots of apps were loaded, / lots of tabs. to the point where i'd be playing google music and larger mp3s would stutter sometimes (like say a 2 hour podcast at 256kbps).

i don't think honestly its a processor issue as this stuff isnt all that cpu intensive, just it stays in ram and it gets better if you close a bunch of apps. so yeah i think if you are going to go with a daily driver phone 2GB is probably ideal at this point (im considering buying a moto x when it comes out, even though the specs are not hugely better just for the 2GB). hell if i could pay the extra $20 to make it 4GB in component costs i would.

 

[poofyhairguy]

I wouldn't consider using anything with less than 2GB nowadays.

Amen. So nice to never have your launcher redraw. I wouldn't touch a 1GB device for something new, I really wish my tablet had 2GB as that is worse than the Tegra 3 SoC.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

My 2GB Nexus 4 redraws like mad, so I'm not sure what you're talking about. It can depend on what widgets you have, but the redraw issue is an inherent Android issue.

Anyway, 1gb versus 2gb. Isn't the the solution really to have the memory management set right for 1gb instead of 2gb? I feel like Google didn't really get this right, and thats why there's scripts on XDA to adjust minfree accordingly. You can't expect all the same apps to remain open on a 1gb machine versus a 2gb machine. With that said, if 1gb is not enough, then what were the days with 512mb devices? Were they slideshows now?

There's a whole thread on Reddit about this and as someone said there:

I don't think this is a RAM issue as much as a RAM management issue.

My previous phone - Galaxy S2 - was fine, but my current phone - HTC One X - is miserable at caching.

Eg it's nigh on impossible to write a post with multiple citation links because you can't switch out between pages without having them reload. Really, really annoying.

 

[ChronoReverse]

The memory management in Android is tweakable. For the One X (which I owned) the problem was HTC tweaked it to be ultra aggressive which gave it good benchmarks but meant multi-tasking was nearly useless because it quickly removed everything from the background. It was quickly noticed and HTC called out for it but they never really fixed it (you had to run Cyanogenmod or another AOSP-based ROM to avoid it).


As for 512MB vs 1GB, it's not as simple because the transition from Gingerbread to ICS had a significant memory jump (you really needed 768MB) and from ICS to JB came another significant jump (at this point, you needed 1GB to have a comfortable slot for apps).


For your Nexus 4, are you using the stock launcher? Redraw should very rarely be an issue assuming the memory management settings weren't set too aggressive (by default they aren't). If you're using Nova or Apex, then you can even tick a checkbox to force them to stay in memory.

 

[imported_brandon]

If you have a powerful enough processor, having just 1GB of RAM isn't necessarily a limitation. You can use Z-RAM, if you're using a custom ROM, or custom kernel, which allows you to allocate a portion of memory as a "swap space", and it compresses said allocated memory.

With the compression ratio generally being 2:1, setting aside 128MB of RAM for Z-RAM can net you up to 256MB "extra memory".

 

[Bateluer]

Today, yes. 1GB is fine. Definitely wouldn't want to be stuck with 1GB for two years though. 1GB is a mid spec now.

 

[Dari]

Today, yes. 1GB is fine. Definitely wouldn't want to be stuck with 1GB for two years though. 1GB is a mid spec now.

FWIW, I like your RAM crusade

 

[Midwayman]

I wouldn't dream of touching a new phone without 2gb of RAM right now. Not that you absolutely need it today, but it'll feel old so much faster.

 

[poofyhairguy]

If you're using Nova or Apex, then you can even tick a checkbox to force them to stay in memory.

Exactly.

 

[vshah]

My 2GB Nexus 4 redraws like mad, so I'm not sure what you're talking about. It can depend on what widgets you have, but the redraw issue is an inherent Android issue.

Anyway, 1gb versus 2gb. Isn't the the solution really to have the memory management set right for 1gb instead of 2gb? I feel like Google didn't really get this right, and thats why there's scripts on XDA to adjust minfree accordingly. You can't expect all the same apps to remain open on a 1gb machine versus a 2gb machine. With that said, if 1gb is not enough, then what were the days with 512mb devices? Were they slideshows now?

There's a whole thread on Reddit about this and as someone said there:

the htc one x was a special case - some terrible multitasking limitations put in place by htc.