iPad mini iPad Mini Memory Page Swapping on iOS 7

[Riemann Zeta]

It is traditionally assumed that under normal circumstances, iOS does not use an on-disk pagefile (as the large number of continuous writes would kill the flash performance over time). So, when free memory gets tight, instead of swapping memory pages to /private/var/vm like Mac OS X, iOS just starts killing open background apps. However, in the case of the iPad mini 1st gen, free RAM is pretty much always tight, even with just one or two apps open. I wonder if Apple has relented on its no-swap policy for the Mini on iOS 7. Curiously, in iOS 7, the mini shows a consistently large number of memory "Page Outs." In iOS 6 (and on the iPhone 5 w/ iOS 7), there were usually only a small number of Page Out operations reported in System Stats-type apps. Does this mean that Apple helped mitigate the effects of the Mini's tiny RAM by enabling on-flash swapfiles? Or is the "Page Outs" indicator simply a phony number? If it's a fake number, then does iOS 7 use the type of active memory compression introduced in Mavericks? Perhaps a more knowledgeable developer can chime in here.