Significantly less available RAM with lots of applications vs few

[MythicFrost]

So, my apps have overtime become a bit too unorganised so I decided to delete almost all of them and I used it for a while and I noticed I had ~120MB free RAM when I'm at the home screen.

At the time I had ~25 apps sync'd and ~8 folders and now I've got around ~180 apps sync'd and ~22 folders -- with the latter I only have ~35MB of RAM.

I'm just curious why? The applications I have open (in the multi-tasking bar) are pretty much identical now compared to prior -- so I don't think I have any more apps which would be using RAM.

 

[sammich]

I actually tried this out once.

I have about 120 apps on my phone, so I opened up every single on in sequence (turns out the MT tray only displays 25 pages, or 100 apps). Once that was done, and the phone settled down (ie after the apps finished doing whatever they were doing on startup), the phone was none more laggy/unresponsive than it would be after a restart, apps/games loaded and played as normal.

The point is: iOS handles memory very well. Don't worry the amount of memory that's being used.

 

[MythicFrost]

I actually tried this out once.

I have about 120 apps on my phone, so I opened up every single on in sequence (turns out the MT tray only displays 25 pages, or 100 apps). Once that was done, and the phone settled down (ie after the apps finished doing whatever they were doing on startup), the phone was none more laggy/unresponsive than it would be after a restart, apps/games loaded and played as normal.

The point is: iOS handles memory very well. Don't worry the amount of memory that's being used.

Thanks for your reply,

I know it handles memory very well, but the more RAM I have results in me being able to have more applications state saved so I can return to them instantly, when iOS runs out of memory it kills the app -- if having more apps is unnecessarily chewing up to 80-100MB of RAM I might want to free some of that up, I'm also curious why it would use that much in the first place.

 

[sammich]

It's hard to compare why one had more RAM free. It really depends on what you did in each app when you closed it, also since then those apps that you've used have probably accumulated more data (similar to the first point), and there's then there's also no guarantees that opening any same app twice would produce the same RAM usage. There are heaps of variables.

That said, which app are you using to check the memory?

 

[MythicFrost]

It's hard to compare why one had more RAM free. It really depends on what you did in each app when you closed it, also since then those apps that you've used have probably accumulated more data (similar to the first point), and there's then there's also no guarantees that opening any same app twice would produce the same RAM usage. There are heaps of variables.

That said, which app are you using to check the memory?

Those apps were pretty much left untouched, they should've been exactly the same as prior -- I'm going to test it again anyway and see for sure.

I'm jail broken, I've got it set to show my memory usage next to the time.

EDIT: Further testing (taking them all off and then on again) indicates it doesn't seem to matter