[ale] OT: Android RAM

[Allan Davis]

Inactive most likely refers to ram which has recently been used by an
application (but no longer needed), and is still being tracked. It is
basically free ram, and will get freed up as it is needed, but the benefits
of doing it this way, is that Applications can be restarted quicker
sometimes (think of it maybe as a cache). It's cheap for the OS to free the
memory, so prematurely releasing it does very little except give the shiny
satisfaction that your free memory is better. Inactive RAM may also contain
cache (but not sure what exactly it's referring to).

RAM is poorly understood on computers too actually. There was a report
recently which claimed that windows
7<http://www.amazon.com/Windows-Premium-64bit-System-Builder/dp/B004Q0PT3I/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1353684038&sr=8-2&keywords=windows+7>
was
using up all available ram and there was swapping. What the guy at the
company didn't understand was that a lot of it was cache which was freed as
needed.

More info is at:
http://reviews.cnet....006694-263.html<http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20006694-263.html>

In a nutshell though, free RAM is wasted ram. The important statistic is
active RAM/Total RAM available.. Too many wars have been fought over
misunderstanding of RAM usage...