Virtual RAM

Spudnick2035

Two days ago, after a mate told me about virtual ram on phones, I changed mine, I have a lot less input lag, a lot less freezes from the game!

If your phone has the ability for this, I would highly recommend it

Only down side to it, it doesn't make you suck any less 🤷‍♂️

Comments

Demonzfyre

You changed an invisible function of your phone to what exactly.....?

TheBair123

personally i'm more of a virtual 49ers kind of guy

Spudnick2035

You changed an invisible function of your phone to what exactly.....?

I changed my virtual ram in my settings to a higher GB

Demonzfyre

What kind of phone do you have and give more detail. If this is actually something that could help someone, tell them how to do it.

Spudnick2035

It's different on every phone, it's easy to Google, I did it on my s21

Demonzfyre

lol mmmmk. It's "so easy just google it" but not so easy you can't just say what you did.

Bashlord

Few Android devices have option for Virtual RAM where device will utilise upto 4GB of storage to boost RAM

IKON

Two days ago, after a mate told me about virtual ram on phones, I changed mine, I have a lot less input lag, a lot less freezes from the game!

If your phone has the ability for this, I would highly recommend it

Only down side to it, it doesn't make you suck any less 🤷‍♂️

This is really interesting, I didn't know about it. Thankfully I am capable of typing things into google, was really worried it may be hard to google, but turns it outs really easy!

Demonzfyre

Few Android devices have option for Virtual RAM where device will utilise upto 4GB of storage to boost RAM

Yes, Vram keeps track of open programs etc.. you can't "change" vram, you can only free up vram from it being used by other apps on your phone. It's worked this way from a long time with computers.

ItsDamien

Few Android devices have option for Virtual RAM where device will utilise upto 4GB of storage to boost RAM
Yes, Vram keeps track of open programs etc.. you can't "change" vram, you can only free up vram from it being used by other apps on your phone. It's worked this way from a long time with computers.

Not exactly. VRAM and Virtual RAM aren’t the same thing. VRAM is what a GPU uses, and can’t be increased. Virtual RAM is something that can be adjusted on an OS to use the on board storage as additional “RAM” to go along with the regular RAM on the device.

So you can have for example:

4gb VRAM
8gb Regular RAM
8gb Virtual RAM

The Virtual RAM will always be slower than the dedicated RAM as it uses the storage memory and has to go through different lanes to reach the CPU, and those lanes are almost always slower than the direct RAM lanes.

Demonzfyre

Few Android devices have option for Virtual RAM where device will utilise upto 4GB of storage to boost RAM
Yes, Vram keeps track of open programs etc.. you can't "change" vram, you can only free up vram from it being used by other apps on your phone. It's worked this way from a long time with computers.
Not exactly. VRAM and Virtual RAM aren’t the same thing. VRAM is what a GPU uses, and can’t be increased. Virtual RAM is something that can be adjusted on an OS to use the on board storage as additional “RAM” to go along with the regular RAM on the device.

So you can have for example:

4gb VRAM
8gb Regular RAM
8gb Virtual RAM

The Virtual RAM will always be slower than the dedicated RAM as it uses the storage memory and has to go through different lanes to reach the CPU, and those lanes are almost always slower than the direct RAM lanes.

When I put Vram, I am meaning virtual ram. I believe what you are referring to is zram which is another function within the phone.

What OP is referring to is Ram Plus in Samsung phones. It allows a user to dedicate more virtual ram from internal storage to increase performance. Article here- https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+free+virtual+ram+s21&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS985US985&sxsrf=ALiCzsZVFAUmGpVzNTLh_I_DP8MW45GaGw:1658420964558&ei=5H7ZYrvQIYOgqtsP1KKTuAQ&ved=0ahUKEwi70uvDs4r5AhUDkGoFHVTRBEcQ4dUDCA4&uact=5&oq=how+to+free+virtual+ram+s21&gs_lcp=Cgdnd3Mtd2l6EAM6BwgAEEcQsAM6BAgjECdKBAhBGABKBAhGGABQkQlYrSVg0iloBHABeACAAVuIAcgGkgECMTKYAQCgAQHIAQjAAQE&sclient=gws-wiz#kpvalbx=_737ZYoSDJ5qjqtsP37ONmAg26

Spudnick2035

lol mmmmk. It's "so easy just google it" but not so easy you can't just say what you did.

Didn't say "so easy" I said it's easy to Google, I'm not here to tell everyone how to do it, I'm telling people if you're phone has the ability, it has helped me out, might help you out too

DNA3000

Two days ago, after a mate told me about virtual ram on phones, I changed mine, I have a lot less input lag, a lot less freezes from the game!

If your phone has the ability for this, I would highly recommend it

Only down side to it, it doesn't make you suck any less 🤷‍♂️

Virtual memory is an Android feature for some Android phones that can in some cases improve the performance of apps that are otherwise having performance problems due to low memory conditions. However, this is not a panacea, and for complex reasons that would take a lot of time to explain virtual memory can also hurt performance, so this should only be used as necessary and with caution.

The short version is that when apps run low on memory the OS typically asks running apps to release some for use by other apps. These apps in turn generally give back memory that is storing things it can fetch from disk again. This frees memory but slows those apps down, because fetching from disk is way slower than if it was just sitting in memory. Virtual memory does something similar, it uses disk as if it was memory and the OS swaps thing from disk to memory to try to keep the stuff apps need in memory, and stuff they don’t need right away on disk. The apps think that stuff is still in memory, and the OS tries to bring it back when the app asks for it. The difference between virtual memory and memory eviction is the OS has to guess what the apps needs and what it can give up. If the OS doesn’t guess as well as the app does, virtual memory can generate worse performance (on a mobile device) than just letting the OS run short of memory.

I’ve also heard that using virtual memory can degrade flash storage over time, because the flash storage runs out of write cycles faster when used this way. But I don’t know if that’s just a theoretical problem or a real world problem observed in the wild.

Tesladon

Reminds me of the “ram doubler” from 486 PCs. And Ram-Man, of course.

DNA3000

Reminds me of the “ram doubler” from 486 PCs. And Ram-Man, of course.

RAM doubler and other similar products from way back when used a combination of virtual memory technology and compression to do their thing. The basic idea behind virtual memory is that the memory the app thinks it has is actually not necessarily in memory, and those contents can be moved somewhere else - generally disk - to make space for other things to use that memory. When the app needs it, that stuff gets swapped back in.

RAM Doubler (and its ilk) added one more trick. Instead of swapping to disk - back then, there was often no disk to swap out to - RAM Doubler swapped out to other memory. However, it first compressed the contents of that memory before moving it to other memory, so the net effect was that all that stuff took up less space in memory. In effect, memory contents were compressed to be smaller, allowing more stuff to fit into main memory.

(You needed to play the memory swapping game because the app cannot be allowed to read the memory directly because it is compressed - it would look like gibberish to the original app).

When memory started to become dramatically cheaper, the performance penalty (and occasional weird incompatibilities) of products like RAM Doubler combined with the arrival of more advanced operating systems that had their own complex memory managers made them less attractive and the technology fell out of fashion. However, it has made a come back in the age of virtual server technology. VMware, for example, uses essentially an identical technology technique in its memory compression feature for virtual desktops.

The state of the art is memory deduplication. The idea here is that often, multiple applications are doing similar things and might be storing identical data in memory. The operating system can be programmed to detect this, and when this happens it tosses one set away, freeing that memory, and allows both apps to point to the same data stored in one place. If ever an app tries to write to that data, the system performs a "copy-on-write" and makes a copy, giving both apps their own separate copy of the memory. As far as I'm aware, no mobile OS does this at the moment though.