How fast and fluid does your new iPhone 6/6 plus feel?

[vgamedude]

If you think that's a source, no wonder you've been such a waste of time. DDR3 desktop RAM consumes about 3W per module. That's more than the entire iPhone logic board combined consumes. So yes, changing capacity in a single module only changes power consumption by a meaningless fraction of a watt for a desktop PC.

But that's not true on a mobile device. Take a look at the mobile packaging: just by some manufacturing process tweaking, Samsung's made a huge difference, even at the same total capacity: "Samsung LPDDR2 and LPDDR3 memory can add up to three days of standby battery life for a smartphone, a 23 percent improvement of the LPDDR1. This equates to an increase in standby battery life from 12.5 days to 15.4 days." http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/file/media/Samsung_LPDDR2_Brochure-0.pdf

Just so you understand how badly you're doing, a single LPDDR3 package consumes about 0.25W. The iPhone uses two modules (0.5W). Getting to 2GB and meeting their current specifications requires four modules or two very high power modules, potentially doubling power consumption and causing RAM power consumption to eat into power available for the CPU and GPU.

Unless I'm mistaken that link talks about changing the type of RAM not adding more RAM of the same type. If apple added 2gbs instead of 1 to the same SOC they have currently every link I have seen and source states that that would have little to no effect on power consumption.

Also I think I should add don't you think it will use way more power to have to reload pages and apps then it would to keep them in the RAM cached? Also uses more data too.

 

[AppleRobert]

I make sure I close apps after I'm done with using it before I turn it off.

What has surprised me is how many I had opened just setting up the 6 yesterday and trying out different things. Email, calendar, calculator, weather, stock, browsing with Safari, listening to music via Spotify, watching some youtube videos and some other stuff.

Damn, this thing hasn't skipped a beat. Unbelievable, no complaints about it whatsoever from that standpoint.

 

[dharadvani]

OK, I'm not disputing the power differences between desktops/laptops and mobile devices.
However, if Android can manage this browser reloading issue far better than iOS, can we at least determine that iOS - or certainly Safari - is poorly coded?

No. Safari may be poorly coded, but that's not evident here. Android allows applications to keep things in memory longer and in greater amounts. Combined with more memory available, tabs will stick around longer.

iOS intentionally dumps tabs from memory more aggressively. Even if an iOS device had more RAM, it would still boot Safari tabs out of memory faster than Android once you switch foreground processes (and because of the per-process browser model, switching tabs in Safari is broadly similar to switching apps).

That's why adding more RAM alone isn't going to put a serious dent in the Safari tab "problem". It's a fundamental design consequence. Whether they could or should do something about it (write pages to flash rather than reload, make memory management exceptions for Safari) is debatable.

Why too do Android smartphones keep increasing their RAM quota?

iOS devices increase RAM, too, just more slowly. Android devices have been faster to move beyond 1GB because of the added overhead of Android (historically, Dalvik, though with ART, it's improved quite a bit), garbage collection in the memory management model, and the fact that Android can't target specific hardware and contains a lot of less efficient abstracted code, not to mention mindless checklist-making spec whores and the OEMs who add bloated custom interfaces on top of it (another area that is improving).

There's nothing wrong with Android for needing more RAM and nothing wrong with iOS for keeping apps on a tight leash. They're just the results of different system architectures and different engineering priorities.

 

[iphone5att64]

Because they get suckered by opposing members and then can't seem to shift the thought, no matter the performance in front of them.

The performance in front of us is choppy and a foreshadow of things to come. When Zoomed mode is faster than Standard I am iPhone 6 Plus, that may be RAM.

Compare iPhone 6 to iPhone 6 Plus.

 

[strausd]

I just got back from an att store and using the plus exactly as I expected I got tab reloading.



Had about 5 tabs open, (CNN,verge,macrumors,youtube,yahoo), letting them all load, scrolling a bit through each, then went to home screen, then went to camera, came back and 2 to 3 of the tabs reloaded.



You guys pretending like this somehow doesn't happen are delusional, sorry.

I see what you are saying, but I don't think RAM is the issue. I just opened 5 tabs as well: fox, macrumors, Apple Store, Engadget, and yahoo. In safari, switching between the tabs reloaded every single one every single time. On Chrome, switching between the tabs didn't reload any of them even once.

Part of me wonders if Apple considers this a "feature", "automatic tab reloading so you always have the most up to date content."

 

[vgamedude]

I see what you are saying, but I don't think RAM is the issue. I just opened 5 tabs as well: fox, macrumors, Apple Store, Engadget, and yahoo. In safari, switching between the tabs reloaded every single one every single time. On Chrome, switching between the tabs didn't reload any of them even once.

Part of me wonders if Apple considers this a "feature", "automatic tab reloading so you always have the most up to date content."

I think if it was a feature it would be more consistant. Because sometimes you get reloads sometimes you don't.

 

[sunking101]

I see what you are saying, but I don't think RAM is the issue. I just opened 5 tabs as well: fox, macrumors, Apple Store, Engadget, and yahoo. In safari, switching between the tabs reloaded every single one every single time. On Chrome, switching between the tabs didn't reload any of them even once.

Part of me wonders if Apple considers this a "feature", "automatic tab reloading so you always have the most up to date content."

I use Opera Coast and it reloads every bit as much as Safari. Chrome is a battery hog.

 

[dharadvani]

I see what you are saying, but I don't think RAM is the issue. I just opened 5 tabs as well: fox, macrumors, Apple Store, Engadget, and yahoo. In safari, switching between the tabs reloaded every single one every single time. On Chrome, switching between the tabs didn't reload any of them even once.

Part of me wonders if Apple considers this a "feature", "automatic tab reloading so you always have the most up to date content."

Part of it is controlled by the website--if you have JavaScript code that's constantly seeking updates, Safari will reload it even if it's not out of memory because it thinks the content is out of date and it needs to reestablish the server connections (which it killed while the tab was in the background, to power down the wifi or LTE chip). Safari will also kill a tab if it's eating up too much CPU or GPU in the background, or for a bunch of other reasons.

Tab reloading does not always mean the device ran out of RAM, which is partly why it's so insane to make it the poster child of "I need more RAM" whining.

I use Opera Coast and it reloads every bit as much as Safari. Chrome is a battery hog.

Chrome is a battery hog in part because it tries a lot harder to keep tabs in memory. That's the price of tabs that don't reload.

The RAM power issue is more than just the actual amount of electricity required to keep all the bits and circuits powered. The more you keep in RAM, the more apps will be active, which has a domino effect on every other power-consuming subsystem. The phone spends much less time in a low-power idle state. You don't notice it in artificial rundown tests, but you will notice it a lot in natural usage, where standby power efficiency is crucial to making it a whole day or more.

These are the kinds of engineering tradeoffs that people lack an appreciation or understanding of. It's not just power consumption that caused Apple to skip a RAM increase. It's also not just RAM that made them build Safari to be so aggressive.

 

[JeepGC]

Feels fast overall

 

[Sekelani]

Very fast. But not way faster than the 5s

 

[Lictor]

Depending on how fast flash storage is on the iphone though speed and such could take a hit by passing off the tabs to flash storage instead of RAM. That is a solution though, I've said it before too that apple should allow a option for that. I'd give up a couple gigs of my storage for a swap partition without hesitation.

Flash storage is pretty fast - this is a SSD. It an order of magnitude slower than RAM but still way faster than reloading from the network, so I think the tradeoff would be acceptable. Remember that keeping things in RAM slows the whole system down too.
But you really don't need a swap partition for that. For one reason, this is not an Intel CPU, I don't think the Ax CPU has built-in support for virtual memory - and managing virtual memory without CPU support would be too costly (in CPU cycles and battery) and complex.
Also, a swap partition is "dumb", it just manages memory blocks, it k nows very little about applications usage patterns. You can get away with that on a desktop computer (plenty of RAM, plenty of disk space, plenty of CPU, plenty of power), but not on a phone.

It's a given that on embedded systems such as a phone, the applications have to cooperate to preserve the limited resources. That's why you don't need a dumb and inefficient swap partition: the OS already gives the applications all they need. iOS calls a delegate every time an application changes state (going to background...). It calls a delegate every time it needs an application to free some memory. It provides API to serialize data to flash storage. These tools are sufficient in most cases.


"There is no point in keeping the fully loaded tabs of Safari in RAM when Safari is not in the foreground"

"I disagree with this heavily by the way. Maybe you haven't found a reason for it but it's silly to say objectively there isn't a reason for it."

I meant from a developer point of view. A tab is just static data, there is nothing being done with it when Safari is in the background, it's just sitting there doing nothing besides eating up RAM that could be used by the foreground application or by active background applications. Keeping large static data in RAM when you're in the background on a device such as a phone is wasteful.

"I browse 4chan heavily and if I'm in the middle of a thread and I have my spot saved and the location where I made my post"

You don't need more RAM or swap space for that, you just need to persist that state to storage as well.

"then the tab reloads on me I have to go through hundreds of anonymous posts to find mine and find my place in the thread meanwhile theres tons of new posts because it reloaded as well"

And I guess that's why the developers of Safari made the choice to reload data : they fear that the content of the tab would become stale and that you would miss the tons of new posts. You would also run into problems with expired sessions on the server side.
Like any choice, it's a compromise. My guess is that Safari targets regular users and not power users. A power user will handle stale data himself by refreshing manually the page. He will also recognize that tabs use RAM (or flash storage if persisted) and he will close them himself. And he will recognize that an expired session is a problem with the server and not a bug from Safari. A regular user might not.

The correct solution is not to add more RAM (because that's just moving the problem a little further away and that encourages developers to be lazy), it's to have a browser built with power users in mind. Now, I don't know if such a browser exist or if it is possible to build one given the limitations on iOS SDK.

 

[vgamedude]

Depending on how fast flash storage is on the iphone though speed and such could take a hit by passing off the tabs to flash storage instead of RAM. That is a solution though, I've said it before too that apple should allow a option for that. I'd give up a couple gigs of my storage for a swap partition without hesitation.

Flash storage is pretty fast - this is a SSD. It an order of magnitude slower than RAM but still way faster than reloading from the network, so I think the tradeoff would be acceptable. Remember that keeping things in RAM slows the whole system down too.
But you really don't need a swap partition for that. For one reason, this is not an Intel CPU, I don't think the Ax CPU has built-in support for virtual memory - and managing virtual memory without CPU support would be too costly (in CPU cycles and battery) and complex.
Also, a swap partition is "dumb", it just manages memory blocks, it k nows very little about applications usage patterns. You can get away with that on a desktop computer (plenty of RAM, plenty of disk space, plenty of CPU, plenty of power), but not on a phone.

It's a given that on embedded systems such as a phone, the applications have to cooperate to preserve the limited resources. That's why you don't need a dumb and inefficient swap partition: the OS already gives the applications all they need. iOS calls a delegate every time an application changes state (going to background...). It calls a delegate every time it needs an application to free some memory. It provides API to serialize data to flash storage. These tools are sufficient in most cases.


"There is no point in keeping the fully loaded tabs of Safari in RAM when Safari is not in the foreground"

"I disagree with this heavily by the way. Maybe you haven't found a reason for it but it's silly to say objectively there isn't a reason for it."

I meant from a developer point of view. A tab is just static data, there is nothing being done with it when Safari is in the background, it's just sitting there doing nothing besides eating up RAM that could be used by the foreground application or by active background applications. Keeping large static data in RAM when you're in the background on a device such as a phone is wasteful.

"I browse 4chan heavily and if I'm in the middle of a thread and I have my spot saved and the location where I made my post"

You don't need more RAM or swap space for that, you just need to persist that state to storage as well.

"then the tab reloads on me I have to go through hundreds of anonymous posts to find mine and find my place in the thread meanwhile theres tons of new posts because it reloaded as well"

And I guess that's why the developers of Safari made the choice to reload data : they fear that the content of the tab would become stale and that you would miss the tons of new posts. You would also run into problems with expired sessions on the server side.
Like any choice, it's a compromise. My guess is that Safari targets regular users and not power users. A power user will handle stale data himself by refreshing manually the page. He will also recognize that tabs use RAM (or flash storage if persisted) and he will close them himself. And he will recognize that an expired session is a problem with the server and not a bug from Safari. A regular user might not.

The correct solution is not to add more RAM (because that's just moving the problem a little further away and that encourages developers to be lazy), it's to have a browser built with power users in mind. Now, I don't know if such a browser exist or if it is possible to build one given the limitations on iOS SDK.

I don't miss posts on 4chan it doesn't reload in the background it only reloads when I select the tab.

Hard to explain what I mean. Have you used 4chan?

Also whether or not you think we need more ram right now it's undeniable that we will need more in the future and that no matter how important you think it is more ram would help safari tab reloads as well.

Your points are pretty moot because the tabs reload only once you select them, not in the background auto refreshing. That provides no benefit to the user.

 

[Lictor]

You know what the purpose of RAM is I take it? It's obvious. So the iphone runs out of ram, purges apps and tabs, because it HAS NO RAM LEFT. Add more RAM and guess what!? THERES RAM LEFT.

Not exactly. The system does not purge apps and tabs because it has no RAM left. It purges them because they are not needed anymore. The logic is that the foreground application and the active background applications should always have as much RAM as possible. Simply because applications with as much RAM as possible perform better and use less power.
So, when an application goes into the background and if that application has RAM structures that are not needed in that background state and if these structures are easy to rebuild or to serialize to storage, the expected behaviour is that it will just discard these structures. Even if there is still plenty of RAM - because that plenty of RAM and more might be needed by the new foreground application.

If you don't do that, the foreground application will use less RAM than it could. Then, it will be more sluggish, it will consume more battery power by rebuilding structures all the time instead of caching them...

"So why even add more RAM then according to you to anything?"

For the foreground application and the active background application. On a mobile device, the purpose of RAM is to benefit to applications that are active, not to serve as some sort of storage for inactive applications that are too lazy to persist their state to flash storage.

"If somehow software always magically fills it all up"

It's not magic. It's just that mobile application make heavy use of object pools and caches. When you have little memory, pools and caches are small and you consume more battery and CPU to rebuild their contents. When you have plenty of memory, they are bigger and you consume less battery and CPU...
That's why the foreground application should have as much RAM as possible.

"you WOULD STILL have far more left than on a 1gb phone"

Yes, and that would be great for the foreground application - more RAM means more complex applications and faster ones. But Safari would still reload tabs. Because it unloads them not because there is a lack of memory, but because the application is well behaved. An application who would keep large structures in RAM when it doesn't need to would simply not make it to the AppStore.
The problem with Safari is not that it unloads tabs from RAM, it's that it does it a little to eagerly (which is a problem when switching back and forth between Safari and another application) and that it does not persist the tabs to storage and reloads them instead.

 

[vgamedude]

Not exactly. The system does not purge apps and tabs because it has no RAM left. It purges them because they are not needed anymore. The logic is that the foreground application and the active background applications should always have as much RAM as possible. Simply because applications with as much RAM as possible perform better and use less power.
So, when an application goes into the background and if that application has RAM structures that are not needed in that background state and if these structures are easy to rebuild or to serialize to storage, the expected behaviour is that it will just discard these structures. Even if there is still plenty of RAM - because that plenty of RAM and more might be needed by the new foreground application.

If you don't do that, the foreground application will use less RAM than it could. Then, it will be more sluggish, it will consume more battery power by rebuilding structures all the time instead of caching them...

"So why even add more RAM then according to you to anything?"

For the foreground application and the active background application. On a mobile device, the purpose of RAM is to benefit to applications that are active, not to serve as some sort of storage for inactive applications that are too lazy to persist their state to flash storage.

"If somehow software always magically fills it all up"

It's not magic. It's just that mobile application make heavy use of object pools and caches. When you have little memory, pools and caches are small and you consume more battery and CPU to rebuild their contents. When you have plenty of memory, they are bigger and you consume less battery and CPU...
That's why the foreground application should have as much RAM as possible.

"you WOULD STILL have far more left than on a 1gb phone"

Yes, and that would be great for the foreground application - more RAM means more complex applications and faster ones. But Safari would still reload tabs. Because it unloads them not because there is a lack of memory, but because the application is well behaved. An application who would keep large structures in RAM when it doesn't need to would simply not make it to the AppStore.
The problem with Safari is not that it unloads tabs from RAM, it's that it does it a little to eagerly (which is a problem when switching back and forth between Safari and another application) and that it does not persist the tabs to storage and reloads them instead.

Can't reply to all this right now with a lengthy response I'm just on a phone but even with all these points about giving the foreground the most ram to work with why is it that I get reloads even when safari is the only ********** thing I have open? That's stupid.

Furthermore more ram would allow to delegate more ram for foreground apps and if you didnt need the rest then it could go to safari if it was in the background. Would give you more to work with, most apps dont take a whole ton of ram in comparison to 2 gbs because they are intended to be basic.

 

[Lictor]

why is it that I get reloads even when safari is the only ********** thing I have open? That's stupid.

Well, you have several pounds of brain matter to decide it's stupid... Safari only has an A6...
When iOS calls a delegate to tell an application that it's going to the background, the applications doesn't have ages to decide what to do. Moreover, it's not going to run any complex and buggy algorithm to decide what to do based on the system state. It will just do the same things over and over: either it's always going to deallocate resources or it's never going to do that.
So, if you go back to the springboard, Safari will just receive the appropriate callback. It has no way to know you will call it back a couple of seconds later or that there is plenty of RAM left.

Also, each tabs in Safari seems to be handled as a separate process, just like in modern desktop browsers. So, switching tab is like switching process.

Now, Safari could handle things differently (like, persisting its whole state, including parsed pages, to storage), but you can't expect it to be anything but stupid, it's a computer program.

Furthermore more ram would allow to delegate more ram for foreground apps and if you didnt need the rest then it could go to safari if it was in the background.

Yes, that's why I would like more RAM too : for the benefit of the active apps, that would allow for more complex games and apps. But that's not the solution for Safari. If Safari is in the background, it seems programmed to yield most of the RAM it is using. So, if you have more RAM, it will just eventually sit idle doing nothing while Safari is discarding tab contents to free up memory as it was programmed to do.
Besides, you would have to wait for the next generation to solve that problem by adding more RAM, and I'm not even convinced it would work, while a software solution could come next week...

 

[r-m]

Can't you break this technical to and fro into a separate thread?

 

[Djentleman]

So far every thread meant to focus on the positive sides of the new phones have taken the same old RAM argument route. I wonder if these people ever have something they can't complain about. Sigh.

 

[FriednTested]

So I can expect a drastic improvement coming from my 4S...