Hi, I know in computers we should leave like 10-20% of memory for the harddrive to work optimally. How much should be left for the iPad 64gb for optimal performance?
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How much freespace is optimal for iPad performance
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None at all, the iPad has a solid state drive. Use all 64GB if you want. Be careful mixing up memory and storage space though. "memory" usually means RAM. You want as much RAM free as possible which you can get by closing apps running in the background.
Just save some space for OS updates, app updates, etc.
Its not smart to completely fill your 64GB. Leave like 1-2GB.
Its not smart to completely fill your 64GB. Leave like 1-2GB.
The fact that iOS devices use flash storage rather than a traditional hard drive has nothing to do with whether or not you need to leave free space. The reason to leave space on a computer drive is so the free space can be used as virtual RAM if the machine runs out. iOS however will just close open apps if it runs out of RAM. It never needs virtual RAM from the flash storage ad no process on the device requires more than the amount of RAM.
I also disagree with your recommendation to close apps not currently being used. The OS handles this itself.
Back when we had old fashioned hard drives, the recommendation was to leave at least 1/4 of the disk space empty. Using 100% of a hard drive would cause the read speeds to slow down because data would be stored near the physical edge of the disk, which made it more spread out and harder to read quickly. Pagefile is another thing that is sort of obsolete - by now most computers have enough RAM that they don't need gigabytes of free space for the pagefile.
SSDs don't have the first problem, and AFAIK an iPad can function without any free space. Apple surely designed it so that somebody could fill their iPad with songs or movies and not hurt performance right? Lets face it, most users have no idea that they should leave room for things like pagefile.
I have filled up my iphone, it is a pain having to delete stuff to make room for updates. I think if you are worried about going over in size, buy the next size up for the iPad.
Oh right, I never realised the location of files on the disk had a bearing on read speed. Surely the read speed is the same because there are the same number of blocks in each track of the disc? Would increased fragmentation from not having enough consecutive free blocks be the cause of the slow down?
In what way? I'm not saying you're wrong- just that I've never quit apps in order to free memory and I haven't had any problems with performance.
I heard ios6 has delta app updates, don't know if it's true, but that would make this problem easier
I have used to have issues all the time. Safari crashed on a regular basis. I have an app that shows memory and sure enough when it get high I see a crash.
Now I keep the multi-task tray pretty much empty and have fewer issues. Something about Safari seems to just not release memory effectively.
I say Safari because that the app I have most issues with. Sure wish we had an app that showed the memory used by app and not just overall. If anyone knows of one I would be interested.
I know, I know, it's supposed to be easy for everyone to use but I sometimes miss not having diagnostic tools. Sigh.
....How exactly are you monitoring ram usage while in safari?
I have an app called System Status. It shows memory, but not by specific app. When I crash or start slowing down I check it and memory is always really up. Usually just closing all apps in the multitask tray works. At times Safari is the only open app.
Once in a while I have to reboot.
You can also go to Settings>About>Diagnostics and Usage>Diagnostic and Usage Data and see the crashes.
I guess I need to completely redo my whole iPad but that's such a pain. On my PC I have a clean mirror image I use to do a complete restore. It has all my important programs, etc already included but I don't have a clean backup of my iPad. So I'll lose some important stuff that doesn't backup.
Unless someone knows of a way to restore pieces of data rather than a complete backup I see no other option.
I'm glad you have the same problem as I have. I've been having less than 1gb storage for months and safari plus other apps crashes all the time (10+) times a day. So I deleted all my music and now I have 20gb storage. Now apps have never crashed thus far *knock wood*. So I guess maybe it helps!
If it helps I was playing with my brothers 16gb 4S yesterday, he barely uses it (has maybe 3 games) and the thing was fast as lightning. I honestly couldn't believe how much faster it felt! Especially when it came to opening settings... for some reason settings can take a second or two on mine.
The laggy response mainly comes from the free RAM space running low. iPhone4 and iPad2 only have 512MB and iPad3 1GB. The solution is to close the running apps and reset the iDevice.
You do need to keep a few GB of the flash drive free if you constantly perform on device update of apps. I don't think you need any free space on the flash drive if you are only doing update via iTunes.
Not entirely true. IDE hard drives slowed down considerably as they filled up as mentioned above.
You probably won't get a definitive answer, because it depends a bit on what apps you use, and what kind of "disk cache" or temporary storage they use.
As a rule of thumb, keeping an extra gig free should be fine on any model iPad. That's plenty for most apps.
If you can spare it, 1.5-2 gig will leave extra space for downloading big game updates and such. (Right now, Update downloads a whole new copy before deleting the old one.)
If you run low on "disk space", iOS will delete the temporary and cache files of Safari, and 3rd party apps. That will slow things down next time you use those apps as they'll need to rebuild their caches by re-downloading files.
I have an iPad, iPod Touch or iPhone hooked up in debug mode almost everyday, so I watch them go through their memory shuffle often. Don't worry about killing apps manually or anything -- iOS is very efficient at cleaning stuff up. Just give it a gig or so of space and you should be good.
As a rule of thumb, keeping an extra gig free should be fine on any model iPad. That's plenty for most apps.
If you can spare it, 1.5-2 gig will leave extra space for downloading big game updates and such. (Right now, Update downloads a whole new copy before deleting the old one.)
If you run low on "disk space", iOS will delete the temporary and cache files of Safari, and 3rd party apps. That will slow things down next time you use those apps as they'll need to rebuild their caches by re-downloading files.
I have an iPad, iPod Touch or iPhone hooked up in debug mode almost everyday, so I watch them go through their memory shuffle often. Don't worry about killing apps manually or anything -- iOS is very efficient at cleaning stuff up. Just give it a gig or so of space and you should be good.