minimum ram to run Android 2.2

[Tung Dang]

Hi all,

Do you know what is the minimum of RAM to run Android 2.2 ?

Rgs,
Tung

[Brad Davis]

Can't give an exact answer but 64m is too little, 128m may work
(depending on what is running) and 192m is suggested (especially for a
slow processor).

[Dianne Hackborn]

I would recommend at least 128MB available to the *kernel*.  In many architectures, a big chunk of RAM will be dedicated to the radio, so you need to take that into account, and the 128MB recommendation does not cover that.  Also if your architecture allocates graphics surfaces in user space, bump it up by 16MB or so (The Qualcomm devices I have experience do their allocations in RAM outside of that accessible to the kernel.)  And of course this also depends on the size and density of your screen, camera megapixels, etc.  If the screen has more pixels than 320x480 or the camera is more than 3 megapixels, bump the size up accordingly.

For reference, the myTouch has 192MB of RAM which on 1.6 only left 100MB left for the kernel and user space, and was *very* tight on RAM.  Don't go that low.  An update to the Qualcomm radio apparently frees up a bunch of space, adding over 10MB or so to user space...  that should run even 2.2 okay.  At this level, though, the amount of RAM is probably the most important aspect to how well the device will run.  Don't skip on RAM, and you'll have a much better running device, with a lot fewer headaches as you try to get everything working well.  That is from painful experience. :)

Another reference point -- the Droid has 256MB RAM, which runs the system well, but it also does its graphics allocations in user space and has a high density screen so you can still end up not keeping as many processes running as you'd like if loading large pages with the browser, running lots of background services, etc.

The Nexus One has 512MB of RAM and honestly that is really more than we know what to do with.  It is great. :)  I ended up putting some code into the activity manager to put a hard limit on the number of processes we would keep around, because there was so much memory we had often could keep way more processes than was useful.  That was never an issue on Droid. ;)

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Note: please don't send private questions to me, as I don't have time to provide private support, and so won't reply to such e-mails.  All such questions should be posted on public forums, where I and others can see and answer them.

[Tung Dang]

Thank you HackBod !!
Very good and clearly advise :)

[Tung Dang]

Hi Davis,
Thanks for your feedback :)

[Dianne Hackborn]

My same answer applies.

And to be clear: there is no answer to "how much RAM does 2.3" need.  You haven't specified a screen resolution, camera resolution, not to mention factors like how the particular chipset architecture is going to partition RAM.  This is not a simple topic.

On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 7:58 AM, Android Developer <ahmed.a...@gmail.com> wrote:

Can you please tell me the minimum RAM to GB 2.3.6 device. and what if I run GB on 256 RAM device ??