Understanding Android memory usage
summary
Android memory pressure triggers kswapd to reclaim cached pages and then the low memory killer to terminate processes in priority order (native, system_server, persistent, foreground, perceptible, services, home, previous, cached), so app behavior on a 2GB versus 512MB device (and Chrome’s PSS falling as pressure rises) matters. Measure impact with PSS via adb shell dumpsys meminfo -s (or -a, showmap, debug malloc when needed), profile the Java heap with Android Studio Memory Profiler, and shrink APKs; test consistent use cases on devices with ample free RAM.
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chapters (16)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:38Memory and the Android ecosystem
- 2:40Physical memory on device
- 3:162 GB device under memory pressure
- 5:43Android process list and the low memory killer
- 11:33512 MB device under memory pressure
- 12:59Application memory impact with shared pages
- 16:45User value / memory impact tradeoff
- 20:13Memory impact depends on a bunch of things
- 21:49Gmail memory for various platform configs
- 23:39Chrome PSS under increasing memory pressure
- 26:29Android Studio's memory profiler
- 27:41But what about the rest of the memory?
- 33:35Non-Java allocations are often tied to Java allocations
- 35:09Things that take space in your APK tend to take memory at runtime too
- 36:591. How memory use impacts a device
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