Re: What is your experience with Samsung "RAM Plus" virtual memory expansion?

Frank Slootweg, 2024-12-07 14:14:

Arno Welzel <usenet@arnowelzel.de> wrote:

Frank Slootweg, 2024-12-06 12:51:
>

Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> wrote:

Edward.C wrote:
>

I think it depends on your usage. If you always have many apps running
at the same time, maybe it can give slight improvement in performance.
>
I have disabled it and never noticed any difference, probably because I
have 12GB of RAM on my A55.

>
Given the way Android apps save their state and are then ready to be
killed when there is pressure on memory, ready to be reloaded "as they
were", then using swap seems a bit pointless?

>
  Yes, but not all apps can be killed and reloaded/restarted "as they
were". For example those which depend on external data or/and state. For
those apps, you want them to be swapped instead of killed.

>
By definition an app *must* support the fact, that it can be killed at
any time. Even rotating the display will kill and restart the current
running activity. That's the reason, why dialog boxes should not be used
but UI fragments instead since the state of fragments will be handled by
the OS instead of the app.
>
But on the other hand it depends on the app developers how good the
implement state changes.

 
  My/the point is that not all apps *can* be designed that way. It might
be that *if* they can be designed that way, they *must* be designed that
way. But an app developer can not be required to do the impossible.

Android *will* kill app activities all the time. An app which can not
deal with that, is mostly useless since - as I explained - even rotating
the display will cause this. Yes, some apps just cope with that by
disabling display rotation as long as the main activity is in the
foreground.

Also see here:

<https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity#onCreate(android.os.Bundle)>

<https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity#onSaveInstanceState(android.os.Bundle)>

<https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity#onRestoreInstanceState(android.os.Bundle)>

[...]

  Also note I mentioned in the part you snipped, if all apps/programs
could be designed that way, we wouldn't have paging/swapping on real
computers, but we do. Guess why that is?

On "real computers" an application process will not be killed just
because you minimize a window. And paging also has nothing to do with
that either but is just the process to move RAM pages to a swap file if
not needed - regardless if there is a process running or not.

--
Arno Welzel
https://arnowelzel.de