Robert Triggs / Android Authority
These days, high-end smartphones and even more affordable models ship with about as much RAM as a modern mid-range PC. And why shouldn’t they? We use our phones for various tasks, from flicking through countless apps to playing the latest high-end games. They all need RAM, and increasingly more of it, especially when it comes to chatting with a large language model or using AI to spruce up our media.
Can your phone even run out of RAM these days? It sounds unlikely, but I put it to the test.
Do you use your phone's RAM management features? 70 votes Yes 36 % No 47 % I didn't know it had any 9 % It doesn't have any 9 %
In theory, it is possible to run out of RAM; if you throw enough sufficiently large applications at your OS all at once, it’s technically possible to hit that limit. But what happens in those instances? Well, logic says those apps would be forced to close, they could hang, or the entire OS could become unresponsive. But that’s very unlikely to happen, and I tested this out to prove it.
How Android takes care of your RAM
Robert Triggs / Android Authority
To keep Android running smoothly and responsive, the OS has a couple of tricks before it starts killing apps you might want to get back to quickly.
The first is compressing apps already in RAM using zRAM. zRAM is basically a compressed block of data that lives inside your RAM. It grows and shrinks dynamically, compressing memory pages to save space and decompressing them when needed. App memory that isn’t needed is seamlessly pushed and pulled to zRAM even before your phone starts running low on memory.
All Android devices use zRAM, with OEMs able to tune how large this compressed pool can grow to balance performance and responsiveness. The catch is that zRAM still uses real RAM, so compressing lots of stuff doesn’t always free as much memory as you might expect.
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