iPad iPad Air RAM test: Safari Tabs

Kimcha · Oct 31, 2013

Hey guys,

I went to the apple store in Sydney and played around with the air a little.

I opened the same websites on both my ipad mini and the iPad air to see when both would start reloading tabs. It's pretty damn disappointing:
iPad mini: 11 or 10 tabs, not sure
iPad air: 6 tabs

I restarted both iPads prior to the test. This was one of the major annoyances for me on the mini and the iPad air seems to be FAR worse at this. I hope people who have already bought the air could post some information on RAM usage after restart and compare it to the iPad 4 and mini.

MikhailT · Oct 31, 2013

Kimcha said:
Hey guys,

I went to the apple store in Sydney and played around with the air a little.

I opened the same websites on both my ipad mini and the iPad air to see when both would start reloading tabs. It's pretty damn disappointing:
iPad mini: 11 or 10 tabs, not sure
iPad air: 6 tabs

I restarted both iPads prior to the test. This was one of the major annoyances for me on the mini and the iPad air seems to be FAR worse at this. I hope people who have already bought the air could post some information on RAM usage after restart and compare it to the iPad 4 and mini.

Yes, this will happen with both iPad Air and iPad Mini with Retina display, they WILL be RAM-starved much quicker. The 64-bit stuff will make the apps eat up 30% more memory, which means you have 1/3 of RAM capacity almost gone on the spot.

That's why some folks are upset that when Apple moved to 64-bit, they didn't double the RAM.

Kimcha · Oct 31, 2013

Btw my mini is running 7.0 and the air 7.0.3.
The air also has th demo mode enabled, hopefully that is eating lots of memory

Branskins · Oct 31, 2013

It could also be that the Air has stricter memory management and reloads when it doesn't always need to. Did you try returning to another app and seeing if it reloads?

Also, didn't the tabs reload relatively quickly?

mcdj · Oct 31, 2013

11 tabs? Hell, my Mini reloads with 2 tabs open if I've been surfing a while.

Lord Egregious · Oct 31, 2013

11 tabs on your mini sounds amazing. I never saw over 5 on my ipad 3.

stephen1108 · Nov 1, 2013

mcdj said:
11 tabs? Hell, my Mini reloads with 2 tabs open if I've been surfing a while.

Exactly... I don't buy this tbh. My mini was HORRENDOUS. I would have MacRumors open, then switch to like the Amazon app, come back and MacRumors would have to reload. It would be such a pain.

MikhailT · Nov 1, 2013

Kimcha said:
Btw my mini is running 7.0 and the air 7.0.3.
The air also has th demo mode enabled, hopefully that is eating lots of memory

No, that has nothing to do with it. Safari is 64-bit optimized, which means it already eats up 30% of the memory and will ran out of space quicker. That is the only simple answer, nothing more and nothing less.

Branskins said:
It could also be that the Air has stricter memory management and reloads when it doesn't always need to. Did you try returning to another app and seeing if it reloads?

Also, didn't the tabs reload relatively quickly?

Nope. It's the same RAM management as every other iOS devices. Air has 64-bit CPU where 64-bit optimized apps will naturally consume more memory without doing anything. Safari is one of those apps and will not match what 32-bit Safari can do on iPad 4.

raccoonboy · Nov 1, 2013

Even cheap android phone at around 100-125 usd offers 1gb of ram.

Their flagship tablets and mobile phone offer at least 2gb on quadcore. Ipad air starts at USD 499 and give 1gb.

Very nice, good job apple.

Kimcha · Nov 1, 2013

iPad mini can handle 11 tabs on a freshly rebooted system. Both devices have been rebooted to make sure the initial condition is the same.

I just tried verge front page + a few articles and my mini started reloading at 8 tabs and air at 6. Once again after a freshly booted system.

It was obvious that coming from an iPad 4 the ram performance on the air would be 20-30% worse! but I was still hoping it it would be better than iPad mini since the air has double the ram. Unfortunately it seems it will actually be WORSE.

Whether it's stricter memory management or anything else doesn't matter, because the user xperience is WORSE.

Branskins · Nov 1, 2013

MikhailT said:
No, that has nothing to do with it. Safari is 64-bit optimized, which means it already eats up 30% of the memory and will ran out of space quicker. That is the only simple answer, nothing more and nothing less.

Nope. It's the same RAM management as every other iOS devices. Air has 64-bit CPU where 64-bit optimized apps will naturally consume more memory without doing anything. Safari is one of those apps and will not match what 32-bit Safari can do on iPad 4.

Well they can tailor the 64 bit very easily. If they assume that the device might be RAM starved, Safari could be a little more proactive.

Basically my question is: will Safari force other apps to reload, or will it try it's hardest to keep them in memory while reloading tabs. Reloading tabs should be pretty fast

Kimcha · Nov 1, 2013

Branskins said:
Well they can tailor the 64 bit very easily. If they assume that the device might be RAM starved, Safari could be a little more proactive.

Basically my question is: will Safari force other apps to reload, or will it try it's hardest to keep them in memory while reloading tabs. Reloading tabs should be pretty fast

Yeah you are right. I hope that's the case and I hope people who already own it could try it and confirm.

Brittany246 · Nov 1, 2013

I rarely have more than 4 tabs open so... Not a problem for me.

bobright · Nov 1, 2013

stephen1108 said:
Exactly... I don't buy this tbh. My mini was HORRENDOUS. I would have MacRumors open, then switch to like the Amazon app, come back and MacRumors would have to reload. It would be such a pain.

I smell something they call bull----

Deacon-Blues · Nov 1, 2013

Eleven tabs? Does anyone actually use eleven tabs? I don't recall ever using more than three! As long as it can handle three tabs it will have no impact on me personally. It IS a bummer it does not seem to better the previous generation, but this seems to be a failure of a test on the extreme end of the scale.

Kimcha · Nov 1, 2013

The point of is post is not to show that you can do 5 tabs on the air and 11 on the mini. It is an unrealistic usage scenario on a freshly restarted iPad with no other apps running. You will never get that in real life.

The point is to show that the iPad air is performing worse than the mini in regards to memory.

And the mini is really, really horrible when it comes to memory. Often having only 2 or 3 tabs open it already starts to reload them. Applications get killed frequently and so on.

The hope was that the iPad mini retina would fix these issues, but unfortunately it looks like it won't. In fact it might be actually WORSE.

yegon · Nov 1, 2013

11 tabs on a Mini? Lol, dream on.

Lambros · Nov 1, 2013

Kimcha said:
The point of is post is not to show that you can do 5 tabs on the air and 11 on the mini. It is an unrealistic usage scenario on a freshly restarted iPad with no other apps running. You will never get that in real life.

The point is to show that the iPad air is performing worse than the mini in regards to memory.

And the mini is really, really horrible when it comes to memory. Often having only 2 or 3 tabs open it already starts to reload them. Applications get killed frequently and so on.

The hope was that the iPad mini retina would fix these issues, but unfortunately it looks like it won't. In fact it might be actually WORSE.

Just opened 20 tabs on my iPad Air with no issues in the slightest. The bottleneck is my wifi, which is running cable. RAM is showing no issues whatsoever.

Also, I'm a web developer by trade, trust me when I say these websites were JavaScript and CSS3-transition heavy. If you need me to run a test for you, let me know. Probably just because it's a demo iPad is my best guess.

PS Upon returning to the first tabs opened, and even closing and then reopening Safari, no tabs needed to be reopened. Weird you had these issues.

sammich · Nov 1, 2013

Just playing with my Air I got this morning (Australia) and been running it through it's paces. There's one thing that sticks out a bit: 3D Maps.

It's generally laggy as you move around and the tiles are loading. So you're panning around so that it loads up all the tiles near a certain viewpoint. Then you realise that it's always loading the tiles again. Look one way, wait for the scene to load all the tiles, the go back to where you were. Grey checker blank space.

A little disappointing I guess.

Kimcha · Nov 1, 2013

Wow that's amazing. I'm really happy to hear that. Could you please try this:
Open the verge
Open one of the articles in a new tab, switch to it and scroll around a little
Switch back to first tab, open another tab I'm background and wait until it loads
Go through all the tabs from left to right and scroll each page a little
Go back to first tab, open another article

Repeat the game until you can't switch between all the tabs without a tab reloading
Post the number of tabs you can open without reloading.

Thanks,

IT Troll · Nov 1, 2013

I would have thought they will be using the new memory compression technology from Mavericks in iOS 7 with 64-bit. That would make up the for the 64-bit overhead.

betabeta · Nov 1, 2013

sammich said:
Just playing with my Air I got this morning (Australia) and been running it through it's paces. There's one thing that sticks out a bit: 3D Maps.

It's generally laggy as you move around and the tiles are loading. So you're panning around so that it loads up all the tiles near a certain viewpoint. Then you realise that it's always loading the tiles again. Look one way, wait for the scene to load all the tiles, the go back to where you were. Grey checker blank space.

A little disappointing I guess.

Yup, very disappointing.

Especially since I just got the 128gb Air, couldn't Apple have added a freaking gb to the top model...geez

I would have even paid an extra $100 for a 2gb model. Apple is missing the boat, they got me trained to pay another $100

bobright · Nov 1, 2013

sammich said:
Just playing with my Air I got this morning (Australia) and been running it through it's paces. There's one thing that sticks out a bit: 3D Maps.

It's generally laggy as you move around and the tiles are loading. So you're panning around so that it loads up all the tiles near a certain viewpoint. Then you realise that it's always loading the tiles again. Look one way, wait for the scene to load all the tiles, the go back to where you were. Grey checker blank space.

A little disappointing I guess.

That is more to do with iOS7 though, no?

Lambros · Nov 1, 2013

Kimcha said:
Wow that's amazing. I'm really happy to hear that. Could you please try this:
Open the verge
Open one of the articles in a new tab, switch to it and scroll around a little
Switch back to first tab, open another tab I'm background and wait until it loads
Go through all the tabs from left to right and scroll each page a little
Go back to first tab, open another article

Repeat the game until you can't switch between all the tabs without a tab reloading
Post the number of tabs you can open without reloading.

Thanks,

I managed to hit 12. Terribly optimised website, mind you. 154 HTTP requests for the home page to load, with an 8 second load time? Made me cry there for a little bro...not cool to show me that kind of garbage

Let me know if there's another website I can try

Kimcha · Nov 1, 2013

Thanks man, I'm so happy. I was really disappointed, but this is giving me hope. It's actually a lot better than the current mini.

----------

And yeah, that's the reason I chose the verge for testing. It's always a performance hog

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