High RAM usage?

gosrox

Is it normal for Android to use so much RAM? I have a pixel 6 and using only 2 profiles the main owner and a secondary. On a cold boot with nothing running but Termux if I run neofetch it says I am using about 5 gigs of ram out of 8 gigs. Is that actually used ram or just prepared ram for when it is needed? My desktop running Linux on cold boot only uses 2.5 gig lol so half of my phone. I never checked in older versions but could it also be a bug in the newer versions? I am on latest.

unwat

gosrox

I have a Pixel 6 and have around the same RAM usage. Looking at my phone's app memory usage history, the app that has used the most memory is Google Play Services at 203 MB. A game I play, which is fairly graphics intensive, hit 134 MB.

Even with 3 GB free, we could still run 15 instances of Google Play Services, or 22 instances of the game I play.

If our phones start running low on memory, Android has a system service that will end old processes. Also the system will also dynamically move memory to and from swap as needed for better performance.

So, I wouldn't pay too much attention to RAM. 8 GB is more than enough to run Android 13, so everything should be working fine even if it appears it's using a lot of RAM.

f13a-6c3a

I think common misconception about RAM is that users panic when they see high RAM utilization but it actually a good thing - RAM is fast and should be utilized to the max for best system performance - what's the point of having it and not using? Obviously, notwithstanding RAM leaks, bugs, or poor memory management, the best scenario is to use 90-100% of RAM all the time with proper memory management that would load and unload stuff as needed leaving just enough free RAM to anticipate next operation.
Obviously, I'm not talking about buggy apps that hog or gobble up RAM unnecessarily and/or maliciously, but if one's phone is consistent in RAM usage, I wouldn't worry about it much at all

juicer

f13a-6c3a that would be nice if it actually worked. Instead, I lock the phone, put it in my pocket, take it out minutes later, and 3 out of 4 times whatever app was open will completely reload (no matter how well written). I get more reloading than I did on my 2GB Nexus 5X years ago, and this phone has 4 times the RAM amount.

I think it has to do with how the hardening is implemented because the #1 memory hog is Vanadium and #2 is Android OS.

Graphite

juicer

That might be more of a caching issue with the app. Perhaps batter optimization kills the running process/service for the app, and there is cache data that must reload. Is this a browser app? If so, they also have some built in configs that want to refresh after a timeout.

juicer

Graphite Is this a browser app?

It's most apps, save for the most basic ones. Anything remotely complex will use up so much memory it's almost certain to reload a few minutes after inactivity.

It's not just apps either. Using any more than 1 profile and switching back to owner renders the phone unusable for 10-20 seconds while the UI is completely frozen as the phone is trying to understand what just happened.

Graphite

juicer

Start a new ticket and post the link to that here.

nazar-pc

The actual free memory applications can use is "available". A lot of RAM is used by caches and it is a good thing.

On my desktop out of 125GiB total I have just 1.1GiB free, but available (to applications) is 95GiB:

               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           125Gi        28Gi       1,1Gi       319Mi        95Gi        95Gi
Swap:             0B          0B          0B

GrapheneOS on Pixel 7 Pro doesn't show "available" column, but otherwise must be behaving identically:

		total        used        free      shared     buffers
Mem:              11G         10G        851M         69M        1.3M
-/+ buffers/cache:            10G        852M
Swap:            3.0G        2.3G        694M

So I think no reason to worry, I'm fairly certain you're not really using all 5G by applications just like on my Pixel there is no way a few applications I have running are using 10G of RAM, most of it must be caches that allow Linux kernel to work faster, kernel will reclaim it for other purposes when necessary.

mike616

Sorry for digging up an old post, but I'm having a very similar problem with my new Pixel 8. It puts apps into standby far more frequently than my older Pixel 5 did. I'm using all the same apps as I did on that phone but it's far worse on this one. It seems like if I background any app and come back to it only seconds later, it has to reload.

It's very inconvenient. Did anyone find a fix for this?